Good evening, SF.

A few minutes ago I was reading an article on the Boeing 737 Max rehab work. There was mention of a bunch of airplanes being stored at Grant County International, and mention of desert nearby. I headed to the maps function to check it out. I saw this:



What got my attention was a number of green circles and semicircles. I thought, "are those real?" Are they big green Pac-Man dots? What the heck?

So I switched to a different satellite map (Google maps) and took another look. It's not significantly different. So now I'm really wondering: what in the world are those? I'm used to fields being relatively square, not circular. What in the world?

Center pivot irrigation creates the circular pattern.

Irrigation for farms. The long arm that rotates around the well head.

Those are agricultural areas - center pivot irrigation systems. It is how farmers water their crops when not using ground irrigation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation

Coolness! Now the round green spots make sense. Thanks, SF!

Reading SigSAC's linked article further: two to three days for a full rotation. Neat!

Interesting that they have a Christmas Tree and Alert Facility at the end of the runway.

Seems to be for fighting forest fires.
Would assume “US Air Tanker Base” is related to forest fighting and not air refueling.

Circle irrigation. Life in the desert. Sucks to spray (crop dust), and the pivots don't look that big until you're drifting into them under a parachute. Then they really suck.

quote:

Originally posted by kimber1911:
Interesting that they have a Christmas Tree and Alert Facility at the end of the runway.

Seems to be for fighting forest fires.
Would assume “US Air Tanker Base” is related to forest fighting and not air refueling.

The retardant that you see in the picture is the tanker base; the whole airport is not the tanker bse; just the area with the retardant (red on the ramap). In 2014, they set a record for their greatest amount of retardant pumped in a month.

Moses Lake is the former Larsen AFB, and its also a busy storage and training location, as well asa operational airport for testing aircraft.

The Berlin Airlift Foundtion operations a C97G as a flying cold war museum. I helped pull it out of storage at Moses Lake years ago. It had been mothballed and was full of pidgeon crap. We ended up buying every ounce of STP oil additive in a 30 mile radius, for that airplane for the ferry flight back to Greybull. Most of it in the little cans.

An air tanker company, long gone now, used to be based at Moses Lake. SLAFCO, operating Catalina PBY's, was there.

quote:

Originally posted by kimber1911:
Interesting that they have a Christmas Tree and Alert Facility at the end of the runway.

Seems to be for fighting forest fires.
Would assume “US Air Tanker Base” is related to forest fighting and not air refueling.

It used to be a USAF base, with Air Defense roll, and later SAC (B-52 and KC-135) roll.

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:
It used to be a USAF base, with Air Defense roll, and later SAC (B-52 and KC-135) roll.

Well there we go, that explains it.
Thanks sigmonkey.

The monkey knows all.

That should have been, "role". (stoopid smartass fone spelchek...)

If you look closely at the area between the Christmas Trees, you will see a building. There are entrance tunnels to this building which is an indicator the building is a "Molehole". Slang term for the facility that alert B-52 / KC-135 crews lived in while on alert duty.

^^^




And the best danged chow halls in the entire Air Force!

For Alert Force, Klaxton, Klaxton, Klaxton.
Loved pulling alert, fun times.

Yep, remember it well:
"Sawyer Control to all Sawyer units, klaxton, klaxton, klaxton! Prepare for Alert Aircraft launch"!