March 2020 – We settle in at Boca Chica Marina, and find great commonality with the community here, all of whom share a common professional bond as current and former military members. Surprisingly, a lot are Army veterans.
Naval Air Station Key West’s national security mission supports operational and readiness requirements for Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, National Guard units, federal agencies, and allied forces.
NAS Key West has perfect flying weather year round and unparalleled aerial ranges that offer aircrew training within minutes after takeoff.
The station is equipped with a sophisticated Tactical Combat Training System (TCTS), similar to the one depicted in the popular movie “Top Gun,” which tracks and records aerial maneuvers. In addition, NAS Key West is the host facility for numerous tenant activities, including Joint Interagency Task Force South, U.S. Coast Guard, and U.S. Army Special Forces Underwater Training School to name a few.
https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrse/installations/nas_key_west.html
The marina is at the western remote end of Boca Chica Key, and to get there by car or bike, you have to cross under the flight path to one of the runways.
Our first few days were pretty quiet. Morning and evening bugle calls, a few helicopters and transport planes.
But then came the weekend. The fighters started to spool up just after sunrise, and the roar of the F/A 18 hornets taking off, doing high-speed passes, and circling the pattern for touch and go landings made us really feel like we were at a Naval Air Station.
And it didn’t stop at sunset. To the contrary, it picked up speed, and for a while, there were at least a half dozen fighters in the air, probably not over 500 feet altitude, turning tight circles around the runway, at about 30 seconds separation. Around and around and around.
We stopped over at the Navigator bar, to listen to the band Ukeleles in Paradise, that we had heard up in Marathon the month before. The jet noise was so loud that half the time we couldn’t hear the music. At one point the musician’s were conferring, and one said ‘Let’s just call it the key of F/A-18.”
The weekend must have started a training rotation for one of the tenant units, and the fighter action was often intense (and loud!) One car alarm in the parking lot kept getting set off by the thundering vibrations of engine tests and takeoffs. ‘Come on, dude! Who’s going to steal your car here??’
One of the interesting tenant commands here is VFC-11 1, Sun Downers, a US Navy Reserve adversary squadron. Currently, it operates 18 Northrop F-5N/F Tiger-IIs, of which 17 are single-seater F-5Ns and the remainder being a twin-seater F-5F, which was dubbed “FrankenTiger” and is one of only three in service with the Navy, being a product of grafting the older front half fuselage of the F-5Fs into the back half fuselage of the newer low-hours F-5Es acquired from the Swiss Air Force.
The Sun Downers operate as part of the U.S. Navy Reserve’s fleet adversary program, providing dissimilar air combat training to fleet strike fighter and Marine fighter attack squadrons, as well as U.S. Air Force, Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard fighter squadrons.
Their sound is totally unlike that of the F-35s or F/A 18s, and when we hear them interspersed overhead, we know that there must be some serious head-to-head games going on.
We have enjoyed a lot of pretty sunsets here, with a good view to the west.
Sounding a conch shell horn at sunset is a long standing tradition in the Keys and the surrounding Caribbean islands. Here in the marina, at sunset, we’d always hear several, sometimes as soon as the sun just touches the horizon, and other times it is a bit later when the last portion of the sun descends out of sight. We look forward to getting our own conch horn, and joining the chorus.