Burlington, Vermont, the first city to run entirely on green energy, launched Bernie Sanders’s political career in the 1970s, and it launches the F-35 a few times a week.
The 158th Fighter Wing of the Vermont Air National Guard, based at Burlington International Airport, flies training missions with the F-35.
The odd pairing of Lockheed Martin’s flying war machines and Burlington’s hippie culture has created tension. And hippie activists being hippie activists, the novel coronavirus has provided an opportunity for the F-35’s enemies in Vermont to strike.
Burlington’s city council voted 11 to 1 on April 13 in favor of grounding the F-35 during the coronavirus pandemic. Of course, the city council doesn’t have any control over the Air National Guard. The vote was on a resolution calling on the state’s governor and congressional delegation to make the flights stop.
Why?
The coronavirus.
About 200 guardsmen at Burlington have already been called up to help combat the epidemic. For one thing, they built a 400-bed medical facility to handle a potential surge in patients.
The city council wanted more. The resolution demanded that all 3,200 to 3,500 guardsmen be roped into the COVID-19 response: “If you focus on actions consistent with your stated goals and mobilize the full Guard in the fight, you might be able to halt the spread of the virus, flattening the exponentially growing curve, avoid overflowing hospitals, and save many lives.”
If that argument seems unlikely, the council and the activists who campaigned for the grounding throughout the process admitted the real reason.
The air base has 15 F-35s, and twice a morning, four days a week, about four to eight F-35s take off over Vermont’s largest city. This is loud. Now that residents are more likely to be home, perhaps with the windows open to enjoy the April weather, noise complaints have skyrocketed.
“When it happens, we have to bring our instruction to a grinding halt, we close all of the windows, we wait it out,” resident Dean Shatzer, now relegated to homeschooling his children, said before the city council vote. “I’m just one person with one kid, and I can’t even begin to imagine the cumulative loss of the educational time across our cities.”
Everybody has coronavirus struggles of their own. For some people, it’s loud fighter jets.
