Published: May 11, 2008 12:06 am            

Vance Air Force Base RAPCON earns its first-ever best in Air Force designation

We see them high in the air, these gleaming aircraft helping turn eager young students into the next generation of military pilots.

We marvel as they fly overhead, leaving Vance Air Force Base on their various missions or returning, a delicate dance of multi-million dollar aircraft containing priceless lives.

When we see them we likely think of the pilots executing the dance, but we never think of the choreographers.

These are the men and women of Vance’s Radar Approach Control, or RAPCON. They sit in a darkened room in a nondescript, roughly rectangular building near the south end of the base, staring at radar screens on which Vance aircraft are represented by electronic blips.

And they are the best at what they do in the entire Air Force, an honor that sets them apart from 156 other facilities across the world.

“It’s quite an honor,” said Chief Master Sgt. Richard Johnston, chief controller of Vance’s RAPCON. “It’s well-deserved. We do quite a mission here at Vance.”

This is Vance RAPCON’s first-ever best in the Air Force designation. The unit has won the AETC-level award seven times, including the past three years

“I’m in total awe,” said Lt. Col. Vincent Lostetter, 71st Opera-tions Support Squad-ron commander. “I came to a squadron that was an outstanding squadron. I didn’t realize what I was walking into when I got here. They are the best the Air Force has to offer. That’s why they won the award, it’s because of the people there.”

Lostetter has a unique perspective. Besides being commander of 71st OSS, of which Vance’s RAPCON is a part, he is a command pilot with more than 4,000 flying hours.

“We’re always professional in the Ghostriders,” Lostetter said. “We understand our impact on the other side of the radio. As a pilot, I’ve got God on one side, I want to have the controller on the other side.”

Johnston is a 27-year Air Force veteran and Vance’s RAPCON is his 11th radar facility. He calls it “the toughest one I’ve ever worked in.”

Vance is the busiest airfield in Air Education and Training Command, and the second busiest in the Air Force, behind only Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas. In the course of a year, Vance controllers oversee some 406,000 flight operations. A flight operation can be a takeoff, a landing or an aircraft transiting Vance air space. Vance controllers oversee roughly the same number of flight operations annually as Nellis, in one-third the airspace.

“Just coming in and making that happen, each and every day, is a momentous task,” said Capt. Joshua Leete, airfield operations flight commander.

Leete echoed Lostetter’s sentiment it is the people of Vance’s RAPCON that helped make it tops in the Air Force, ranging from 18-year-old airmen just out of technical school to civilians who retired after long careers as Air Force controllers.

“The guys working behind the scopes, is what it is,” said Leete of the reason for the Vance RAPCON’s continued success.

Vance’s airspace spans some 12,000 square miles, covering an area from I-35 to the east to Gage in the west, and from the Kansas border to the north to Kingfisher in the south. Vance’s airspace is “owned,” or controlled, by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Kansas City Center. Vance, in effect, “borrows” its airspace from Kansas City Center when it conducts flight operations.

Just as Vance trains some 400 pilots per year, RAPCON conducts its own training of young controllers. All prospective controllers must attend a 14-week technical school at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. There they learn the basics of RAPCON. Once they get to Vance, their training continues, involving hours of study, simulator work and live controlling under the guidance of a trainer. When their training is complete, Vance controllers are FAA certified. In all, the training process can take as long as two years.

“We’ve all flown in to either Oklahoma City or Wichita,” said Johnston. “We run more operations here at Vance than these two facilities combined, and we do it with 18-, 19- and 20-year-old kids. When you fly into Oklahoma City, when you fly into Wichita, you’re talking to 30-, 40- and sometimes 50-year-old, seasoned controllers who have been doing this all their lives.

“We have to take kids off the street, discipline them and train them to work here at Vance, and it’s not an easy chore.”

“The training here is yet another reason why I think we won this award,” Leete said. “The training program here is the most innovative system I’ve ever seen in my life.”

In the past year, Vance controllers have had to develop procedures for dealing with the newly formed 3rd Fighter Training Squadron, which teaches recent graduates Introduction to Fighter Fundamentals. Vance controllers had to figure out how to integrate IFF training and normal undergraduate pilot training missions.

“That was a big part in us winning the award, too,” Johnston said. “Those two missions don’t really mix very well. Basically, we were involved with the squadrons, managing the airspace for them.”

“You’ve got the second busiest operation in the Air Force to begin with, but now it’s changing, it’s leaning forward, it’s going toward tomorrow,” Leete said. “These guys just implement it, make it work and it’s seamless.”

Vance’s RAPCON was judged best in the Air Force despite having nine people deployed from the unit in the past year. One controller, Airman 1st Class Nive Leasiolagi, spent her deployment to Iraq carrying a weapon as part of a security forces assignment.

“It’s phenomenal what we do with our folks,” Lostetter said.