The Pentagon is again pushing for another round of base closings. The North Carolina Air National Guard is based out at the airport and flies C-130s. The Air Force isn’t buying C-130s at a high enough rate to replace older aircraft, so over time the Air Force will simply end up with fewer C-130 units. And that extends to the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserves, which do most of the C-130 flying.
If BRAC happens soon, there’s a chance that Charlotte Douglas International Airport could be a loser in the process. While CLT was ranked very highly in the last BRAC round back in 2005, it’s teh second best C-130 base in North Carolina, behind what is now Pope Army Airfield in Fayetteville. Thus, there’s always a chance that the base closing panel could simply recommend painting “NC ANG” on the tails of some of the C-130s at Pope and eliminating the military facilities at the airport here in Charlotte. The odds are probably slim that this would happen in 2013 but they aren’t zero.
Whether such a move could happen in a future BRAC round 10 or 20 years down the road is a different matter. One interesting aspect of Jerry Orr’s long term expansion plans for CLT is that it envisions five parallel runways. The fifth of those would go to the east of the existing east most runway (18L/36R) — exactly where the existing NC ANG ramp is. At minimum, it would require a considerable expense to relocate the N.C. Air National Guard around CLT. And quite frankly, it may well be more cost effective to relocate the ANG to Fayetteville at that point.
This is a topic, like a lot of stuff that Orr has proposed, that has gotten zero serious discussion in town. And it should.
