Goodbye or just so long? Hill Air Force Base squadron inactivated

HILL AIR FORCE BASE — They've known about this day for about a year. But that didn't stop Friday from being a bittersweet day for two units at Hill Air Force Base.

It felt like a loss, like a brotherhood — a family — was being disbanded.

This was their fighter squadron and their maintenance unit, the Rude Rams, that they would no longer be called.

They trained together and deployed together.

It was their group that kept an F-16 flying for 40 consecutive missions — unheard of by commanders — without a mechanical breakdown. And they did it in Afghanistan during their February-May deployment.

Friday, former and current Rude Rams said goodbye to the squadron they've known so well.

"I never thought it would happen," said Steve Kelleher of Washington Terrace, who retired from the Rude Rams in 1997 as a specialist flight chief.

In June 2009, the U.S. Air Force announced that about 600 people from two Hill units would be transferred to other units at the base or to other bases. The moves are included in measures across the Air Force to save about $355 million in fiscal 2010 and $3.5 billion over the next five fiscal years.

The Air Force will retire 259 aging planes, though the F-16s assigned to the 34th Fighter Squadron will be transferred to the South Dakota Air National Guard and to a base in Italy. Some of those planes have already left.

Col. Scott Zobrist, commander of the 388th Fighter Wing, and Lt. Col. Brad Lyons, commander of the 34th Fighter Squadron, furled the squadron's flag Friday, a symbol that the squadron was deactivated and that Lyons had relinquished his command.

It's the first deactivation Lyons has seen in 18 years.

"It's a strange mixture of celebration and sadness" that he sees among his airmen, he said.

They would love to stay Rams.

But it might not be goodbye for the 34th Fighter Squadron and 34th Aircraft Maintenance Unit.

When the F-16 was introduced into the Air Force in 1979, the 34th received the first fully operational squadron.

Lyons would love nothing more than to see the 34th receive the first fully operation squadron of the next generation fighter, the F-35 Lightning II.