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Airlift wing commander explains base’s mission
By Ed Runyan
CHAMPION
Col. Daniel J. Sarachene, commander of the 910th Airlift Wing at the Youngstown Air Reserve Station, says his pilots fly their C-130 aircraft only about 500 feet above the ground to train for its missions.
“To you guys, that may seem very low. To us, it’s not that low. We’d like to fly lower, but that’s our peacetime restriction,” he said Friday during the Good Morning Trumbull County program at Kent State Trumbull.
When the aircraft leave the air base at Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport, they fly over Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio and end up over the Ravenna Arsenal, “and then we will throw out our air-drop loads over our drop zone, which is over the Ravenna Arsenal,” he said.
“We also practice our aerial spray capability over the Ravenna Arsenal, so we are very ingrained and tied to the Ravenna Arsenal,” he said. “So the future of the arsenal is very important to us.”
The colonel said the base’s mission is tactical airlift: “We deploy our members and we go in the theater, wherever that is, if it’s in Southwest Asia, Middle East as it is now ... or any theater – we take our airplanes and we fly within the theater.”
The most recent overseas deployment was from September 2016 to January 2017 in Southwest Asia and involved 170 members of the airlift wing.
The spray mission, which gets the most visibility, is the reason for the base’s most recent deployment in September. Ninety-one members went to Texas because of Hurricane Harvey to treat for mosquitoes.
“We are the only unit that does that ... in the Department of Defense. One-hundred percent of the Department of Defense’s capability for aerial spray is right here in Youngstown, Ohio,” he said.
The air base is the fourth-largest employer in the Mahoning Valley with more than 1,800 personnel.
Also at the program, Lance Grahn, dean of Kent State Trumbull, talked about the affordability of attending the campus compared with other colleges, the planned addition of a theater major there next fall and his desire to make use of 350 acres of undeveloped land the university owns along Educational Highway and Research Parkway near the university.
Other speakers were Trumbull County Commissioner Frank Fuda, who talked about sewer and water projects; Ron Bierman, president of the Trumbull Regional Medical Center, formerly known as Trumbull Memorial Hospital; and Michael Shrock, Chemical Bank’s regional president of the Mahoning Valley.