Satire: Wing Commander celebrates 5 years of F-35 at Burlington Airport

Sure it’s hell for civilians in the flight path. That’s the point.

5 years ago today, the first two F-35 jets arrived for training in Vermont. Now 20 of them are based at the Burlington International Airport, where the Vermont Air National Guard shares the runway with civilian aircraft.

To celebrate this anniversary, Vermont Air National Guard Wing Commander Col. Dan Finnegan provided this exclusive interview with CancelF35.substack.com.

Careful. This is Satire.

Asked about the choice to base the F-35 at an airport surrounded by the most densely populated neighborhoods in Vermont, Col. Finnegan, said, “it was no split-second decision 5 years ago. It was the subject of years of a careful study by top Air Force officials. They wrote a thousand-page report.”

Asked what that report showed that made Burlington attractive compared to the other locations around the country, Col. Finnegan said, “Look. Nowhere else could airmen get the kind of training they get here. There is a very heavy population adjacent the runway in South Burlington and in the flight path over Winooski, Burlington, and Williston. That was what we were looking for. It was available at none of the other five locations studied in the Air Force report.”

Asked why a heavy population was desirable, Col. Finnegan said, “We don’t have to directly do anything with bombs or bullets to get what our airmen need from the training. Just taking off and landing in a densely populated area does it automatically.”

Col. Finnegan further said, “The 115-decibel F-35 noise impacts over 2000 acres around the runway and in the flight path. Repeated exposure to thousands of F-35 flights each year automatically causes severe damage to civilians in that area. The Air Force report showed that the cognitive development of more than a thousand Vermont children would be permanently impaired.”

Asked whether it bothers anyone in the Vermont Air National Guard to do that, Col. Finnegan replied, “Yes, of course, but that is what we train to do. These are good people. We need to desensitize them. We need our pilots used to hurting populations, similar to the training of F-35 pilots in Israel, so we can do what they are doing in Gaza.”