The White Falcon - 09.04.1993, Qupperneq 4

Lighting crew
Story and photos by
J02 Carlos Bongioanni
“How many individuals does it take to
screw in a light bulb?” All of us have proba-
bly heard or told a light-bulb joke at some
point in our lives. However, the work in-
volved in changing and fixing lights along an
airport runway is anything but a joke.
The airfield lighting crew at Naval Air
Station, Keflavfk, specializes in light fixtures
of all shapes and sizes. They maintain nearly
5,000 lights which line more than 50,000 feet
of runways and taxiways.
“It’s a never-ending battle,” said EMI
Dennis Martin, airfield lighting leading petty
officer. “We repair or replace on an average
15 to 25 lights daily. Naturally, light bulbs
are going to bum out and occassionally strong
winds will knock down a few light poles, but
here in Iceland during the winter, snow plows
cause the greatest damage.”
Martin inspects a light on a snow-covered
runway.
According to Martin, the force of the snow
thrown from the plows often snaps the lights
that run along the edges of the runways. The
plows also dig up a number of the “center”
lights that run down the middle of the run-
way. These flat, 30-pound light units are
sturdy, but no match against a snow plow.
They are often mangled beyond recognition,
but thanks to the airfield lighting crew, they’re
not beyond help.
keeps planes out of the dark
Martin looks up from work as an F-15 flies over.
After making daily rounds of the airfield,
replacing any non-operational lights, the
lighting crew brings to its shop all the lights
needing repair. Nikulas Sveinsson, airfield
lighting Shop Foreman, has seen many
changes during the 36 years he has worked at
the base, but he says the need for reliable
lighting has never changed and will always
be of utmost importance as long as there is an
airfield here.
“We take pride in our job, knowing that
many people rely on our work. Sometimes it
gets crazy around here, but we always try to
do the best job possible. If we have to go
outside in the freezing cold and dig through
snow to fix a light, we’ll do it,” said Sve-
insson.
In January of this year, a snow plow
knocked out a light and its concrete base,
shorting out the lighting along an entire taxi
way. It took airfield lighting two days of dig-
ging through several feet of snow, going
from one light to the next, before they found
the problem.
The importance of keeping the airfield
lights 100 percent operational cannot be over
emphasized. “Because we have so much
adverse weather in Iceland, and because it’s
dark so much of the time in the winter, lights
play a major role in our operations,” said
Capt. David Kooney, Assistant Director of
Operations at the 57th Fighter Squadron. “If
the lights went out, we’d have to divert our
planes all the way to Scotland. That’s a long
distance to fly.”
In 1992, the air traffic tower at NAS
Keflavfk recorded more than 63,000 take-
offs and/or landings at the airfield. Many of
those movements depended on the lighting
system at the airfield. The personnel work-
ing behind the scenes at airfield lighting may
not be as visible as the lights they keep illu-
minated, but the results of their efforts are
noticed on a daily basis. “It’s one of thosj
jobs if we do it right, nobody knows we’:
here, but if we don’t do it right, everybody
from the admiral on down will be after us,”
said Martin.
ire
Jon Emilsson, airfield lighting electric
makes repairs on a strobe light.
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The White Falcon