Inside Pennsylvania National Guard’s Fort Indiantown Gap Base

The Pennsylvania Army National Guard operates one of the largest fleets of helicopters within the US Army. Aviation Week recently visited the Fort Indiantown Gap base on a busy drill weekend.

This base in the Keystone State is home to numerous helicopter types as evidenced by this shot of a busy ramp.

With so many aircraft and so few full-time personnel (a trait typical of National Guard units) at the base, the PA ARNG does a remarkable job of keeping all these assets airworthy.

In the regular Army, maintenance personnel would join up, get trained and then get assigned to a unit after a few months of instruction. There's obviously a steep learning curve to become familiar with all the assets they are tasked to look after.

A typical enlistment is for six years, and then some will extend their term and stay on, and many will leave the service. Some will leave after four years and become reservists for two years. Either way, the overall stay in-service is relatively short for a lot of trained personnel. All that training they received then goes out of the forces into the civilian world, and each time somebody leaves a unit, somebody else needs to be trained up to replace them.

What happens in the National Guard is a very different story. People who are civilians for most of the month, sign up for typically one weekend per month of service in addition to their regular jobs. This tends not to be a short term commitment, and many of the people I spoke to had been in the Guard for 10 or 20 years. Their longevity of service means that their vast collective experience is not lost to the  Army when they go back to their regular lives. They will come back time and again and there really is no substitute for this experience. Also, since the part-timers do only work so many days per month, their output tends to be more productive. They are focused, there's work to be done, and they get on with it. In the regular service, there might not always be dedicated maintenance work for every maintenance person every day, but they are on the full-time payroll so something will found for them to do.

It's not uncommon to find high-ranking officers in the hangar, wrench in hand, doing routine maintenance during the week. Since most of the unit doesn't work Monday to Friday, it's only the regular personnel who are there to keep the ship running. These are more often than not more senior-ranking people.

What all this adds up to is that the National Guard can "turn around" (perform a large maintenance task such as a 500-hour phased inspection) one of their helicopters often quicker than the regular Army and with less manpower, and hence at less cost.

Next time we'll have a closer look at the various helicopter types flown by the PA ARNG.

I would like to thank all the guys at the 28th CAB who gave up their valuable time for us and were such knowledgeable and friendly hosts.

All photos by Nigel Howarth.