Nellis Air Force Base spokesman Capt. Justin McVay on Thursday shows the expended flare, left, that fell Wednesday night into a North Las Vegas neighborhood. The longer flare McVay is holding is a dummy flare. Photo by K.M. Cannon.
Col. Mike Bartley Commander of the 99th Air Base Wing says safety board will investigate
A 3-foot-long illumination flare that ignited and burned as it fell over a North Las Vegas neighborhood Wednesday night was "inadvertently dispensed" from an A-10 Thunderbolt II warplane, a Nellis Air Force Base commander said Thursday.
Col. Mike Bartley, commander of the 99th Air Base Wing at Nellis, said the pilot of the A-10, an attack jet known as the Warthog, is a "very experienced instructor pilot" who was making his final approach to the base's south runway when the flare fell from the plane about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday. The aircraft, based at Nellis, was returning from a weapons school training sortie over the range, north of the base.
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Bartley would not speculate what caused the flare to detach from the plane and said a safety investigation board will take about a month to come up with the answer.
"In about 30 days, we'll have a good idea. We'll know exactly what happened," he told reporters gathered at the main entrance to the base near Craig Road and Las Vegas Boulevard.
The safety investigation is being conducted, he said, "in order for us to determine what exactly happened, why the flare came out of the aircraft, how it came out of the aircraft."
"We do this in order for us to prevent this from happening again and to preserve public safety," Bartley said.
The LUU-2 high-intensity flare is used to illuminate targets for warplanes and troops on the ground.
The flare burns magnesium for about five minutes as it dangles from a small parachute that carries it over a target area.
In the Wednesday night incident, the burning flare with its parachute deployed drifted southwest of the base about four miles and landed in a yard in the 2700 block of Daley Street, near Las Vegas Boulevard and Civic Center Drive, a base spokesman said.
The incident, which caused no injuries, occurred on the same day that Bartley appeared before the Clark County Commission to argue against a plan to build a shopping center near the base.
The commission rejected New Mark Land Co.'s proposal to build a shopping center at Nellis Boulevard and Carey Avenue.
"I really don't want to tie this incident to the development ... but it really does have a little bit of an effect," said Bartley, who has 3,800 hours of experience flying A-10s, F-16 fighter jets and other military aircraft.
The proposed shopping center would have been in what he called the base's "accident potential zone," where aircraft mishaps are most likely to occur.
"Now this flare did not land in the accident potential zone, but this is a good validation that things do happen when we fly these aircraft," Bartley said.
"Things do fall off airplanes. Airplanes do crash now and again, and we do have incidents in and around our airport," he said.
Combined with a 3,000-foot "clear zone" adjacent to the base's north and south runways, the accident potential zones extend for a total of 15,000 feet, about 2.8 miles from each runway, and cover a swath 3,000 feet wide.
