Hill Air Force Base's relevance reinforced with $45M F-22 maintenance shop

HILL AIR FORCE BASE — Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, laments the federal government's decision to stop making F-22s.

But that makes quality maintenance of the in-service fleet of 187 F-22 Raptors all the more important to ensure they have a long, serviceable lifespan, Bishop said Thursday at Hill Air Force Base.

The occasion was the unveiling of the final phase of an F-22 heavy maintenance facility, built at an overall cost of $45 million and with enough enclosed space to cover three-and-a-half football fields.

F-22 maintenance at Hill is "one of many things that makes it a strong and viable base," Bishop said, responding to a question about plans for massive defense cuts.

"The Air Force has been told they need to cut 16,000 positions," Bishop said. "We're going to be looking in Congress very specifically on how far these cuts will go and which direction they will go."

The F-22 is a twin engine, single-seat stealth fighter capable of flying faster than Mach 2.

Col. Allan Day, commander of the 309th Maintenance Wing at Hill, said 12 F-22s are out of the active fleet at any given time for maintenance. Hill is currently tasked with half of that workload but now has the capacity to handle a dozen F-22s at a time.

The mostly civilian workforce that strips down incoming F-22s and rebuilds them totals 168. That workforce has the potential to grow to about 230 with the current workload, Day said. Whether the workload increases is a possibility but not a decision that will be made locally.

Hill is also a maintenance depot for the F-35, which is also scheduled to take residence on the base, replacing the flying wing's aging F-16s.

Bishop said he does not see a threat to the plan to make Hill one of the first operational bases for the F-35 and sees that development as making Hill "extremely significant" to the Air Force in the future.

"I don't want people just to naively think we're just trying to get more jobs here," Bishop said. The new developments are part of assessing the country's future defense needs. "We don't have the luxury of guessing incorrectly."

E-mail: sfidel@desnews.com

Twitter: SteveFidel