|A joint military training exercise led by the New Hampshire National Guard will take over the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone for five days starting next Monday.
Half a dozen units will participate in Operation Northern Phoenix, an exercise intended to show the ability of the U.S. Air Force to deploy rapidly and establish landing zone operations at airfields in hostile environments, according to a redacted presentation provided to supporting civilian organizations and a national guard official.
The event is the second in five years of planned training exercises at Loring, the first large-scale military operations on the base since it closed in 1994. The 260th Combat Airfield Operations Squadron, based at Pease Air National Guard Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is hosting the program.
Several other Air National Guard units from Maine and New Hampshire are also set to participate, along with units from New York and Connecticut.
“We’re talking C-130s and multiple helicopter incursions … F-18 fighter jets, there is an armored convoy unit that’s coming to stage an ambush, there’s a security platoon coming to do building clearing and tactical rescue and search,” said Jonathan Judkins, CEO of the Loring Development Authority — the quasi-governmental cooperation that oversees the former base. “It’s pretty exciting.
The exercise is pared down from its original iterations, which included five units that will no longer attend, a New Hampshire National Guard lieutenant said Thursday. Those units are: several air refueling squadrons with the Maine Air National Guard, the Kentucky-based 123rd Contingency Response Group, Vermont’s 134th Fighter Squadron — nicknamed the Green Mountain Boys — and the 69th Bomb Squadron, which flies B-52 Stratofortress bombers.
The lieutenant declined to offer a specific reason for the changes.
Other significant military aircraft that were planned, but will no longer be part of the exercises, include KC-135 Stratotanker, KC-46 Pegasus and C-12 Huron.
The operation, initially planned to begin Sunday, will now start Monday.
In the more than three decades since Loring closed, efforts to commercialize the longest runway in Maine and the thousands of acres of land and buildings that surround it have moved slowly.
But that trend has started to reverse in recent years, in part because of Northern Phoenix.
A global aerospace company that retrofits wide-body passenger aircraft moved into the base’s most recognizable building — a more than 100,000-square-foot arch hangar — last summer because of the attention brought by the training exercises. The company, Kansas City-headquartered Aero Intelligence, signed a 20-year lease worth $5.4 million that covers a full restoration of the historic hangar.
Green 4 Maine, a redevelopment company that purchased roughly 450 acres of the former base in 2023, has also brought in a handful of tenants into long-unoccupied buildings, with more on the way. And the construction of a $65 million potato chip factory at the site is expected to be completed this year.
“This proves to the world that Loring is not just a mothballed runway,” Judkins said. “It’s a viable training resource for multiple different military units as well as local law enforcement.”
The operation will begin with a helicopter infiltration to establish a landing zone before the 109th Airlift Wing flies in equipment to support larger operations, the lieutenant said.
At least one military VIP is scheduled to be part of the operations on June 10, though the presentation does not specify how many will be present or who they are, and representatives for the New Hampshire National Guard did not respond to a request for additional information.
The training exercises will also assess the military value of an deployable instrument landing system and a lighting system from the aviation contractor Avlite.
The runway, taxiways, airfield operational areas, and other zones of the former base are closed to unauthorized personnel and will be strictly monitored over the course of Northern Phoenix. The Loring Development Authority has installed camera surveillance systems in those areas, and will use vehicle/license plate monitoring, it said.
“This opportunity will provide the 260th CAOS, 157th [Air Refueling Wing] and the Air Force as a whole an invaluable training site and opportunity,” the New Hampshire National Guard wrote in a summary of the operation.
