A deafening roar lured Tammy Pitmon out of her Underhill home on August 27. Looking skyward from her deck on the side of Mount Mansfield, she was shocked to see a large aircraft so low “I was sure the plane was flying into the mountain,” she told Seven Days. “That’s how dramatic it was.”
Pitmon is accustomed to the Vermont Air National Guard’s thunderous F-16 fighter jets flying overhead. But this plane was different: It had a fat fuselage, an enormous wingspan and two bulbous propeller engines hanging from each wing. It was massive, gray and lacked any discernable markings.
When the plane disappeared from sight, Pitmon listened for the sound of an impact. Instead a second plane flew over her, just as low, that was identical to the first. She said she could hardly believe her eyes.
The planes were “just hauling ass, right on top of us,” she said. “Almost like you would see in a movie like Mission Impossible. Almost like they were chasing each other.”
She called the Vermont Air National Guard. “The person that I talked to said, ‘Nope, wasn’t us. Nobody flying today,'” Pitmon said.
Burlington International Airport officials had no more information. Kelly Colling, BTV’s deputy director of aviation operations, told Seven Days the airport had no record of the incident.
“Air traffic control at BTV was not talking with any aircraft in that area around that time,” Colling wrote in an email. “They can’t make a guess at what it was because radar will not pick up aircraft at low altitudes” — that is, anything flying under 1,000 feet.
The day after two large aircraft buzzed Vermont’s highest peak, Vermont Guard and Burlington airport officials still couldn’t identify the planes.
“The Vermont Air National Guard was not flying on Sunday or Monday,” VTANG public affairs officer Lt. Chelsea Clark wrote in an email. She said she reached out to the Air National Guard in New York and Connecticut, and “neither were performing training in the area.”
The Federal Aviation Administration restricts most pilots from flying at very low altitudes. “An aircraft can legally fly 500 feet above unpopulated areas and 1,000 feet above populated areas,” BTV’s Colling wrote in an email. Underhill residents described the planes as being lower in a local Facebook group.
“I didn’t see them, but I heard them and felt it,” Stephanie Brogle wrote in response to Pitmon’s post. “Thought they were gonna land on the house!”
Andy Chamberlin also saw the planes and managed to snap a photo of the second one. Drawing from the social media reports, he believes they flew through Mount Mansfield’s Nebraska Notch, then banked and followed Route 15 north.
After Seven Days provided Clark with Chamberlin’s image and additional details about the time of the flight, she provided an explanation last Wednesday, two days after the incident. She said Connecticut’s Air National Guard told her in a follow-up call that two of the unit’s C-130 Hercules cargo planes took off from Bradley Air National Guard Base north of Hartford that day and flew a low path over Mount Mansfield.
No one in Vermont — at the Guard or the airport — had prior knowledge of the training mission.
According to Connecticut Air National Guard spokesperson First Lt. Jen Pearce, the pilots were practicing being sneaky.
“I don’t know how much I can say,” Pearce said. “I guess I can say we do low-level flying to avoid detection, so that’s what we train for.”
Military pilots are allowed to fly lower than their civilian counterparts, Pearce explained; the guard’s training missions can be as low as 300 feet. Witnesses who posted to the Underhill Facebook page said the planes swooped down to 60 feet above the trees — so low, the residents said, that they instinctively ducked.
Pearce said the planes might have appeared lower than they were, especially viewed from Underhill, on the western slope of Mount Mansfield.
Plus, they’re huge. With a design dating to the 1950s, C-130s are the big-bellied workhorses of U.S. military aircraft. According to the U.S. Air Force, they can carry up to 42,000 pounds and are approved to carry up to 90 soldiers — or 64 if they’re parachuting from the plane’s rear ramp. The cargo airships can be outfitted as airborne emergency rooms for shuttling injured soldiers from the front lines.
Pearce said that Connecticut’s air guard flies eight C-130s in airlift operations. They practice “tactical flying,” she said: low-altitude resupply missions intended for parts of the world where planes that appear on radar are targets.
A 30-member team from the unit deployed to southwest Asia in 2017. The cargo planes also supported recovery operations in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake, according to the air wing’s website.
Pearce said the unit commonly trains over Vermont, but frequently changes up the flight paths depending on weather and which skills pilots are working on.
Pitmon has come to a different conclusion.
“I think it was kind of, ‘We’re up in Vermont and we’re kind of cowboying around,'” she said. “I think they were having some fun and they were flying really low and buzzing around, and it panicked a lot of people out here.”
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This article appears in Sep 5-11, 2018.
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I also have observed the same type of aircraft flying so low near my property in Bethel that I thought they would crash. After the second incident I reported to the FAA but never received any response back from them regarding the incident. I am not sure about the benign nature of these flights. Everyone seeing these flights must report them.
I also spotted a similar large cargo plane, VERY LOW, flying over Guilford, VT near the MA border, about 2 weeks ago. So there’s your anecdotal evidence, yep.
They flew over my house in Hardwick at what seemed to be barely over the tree line.
Piloted military aircraft are going away. It’s only a matter of time. Unmanned drones are the wave of the future… Dystopia.
We were spending a lazy late afternoon on Molly’s Falls Pond (Mashfield Dam)in our boat anchored at the far end. (Vermont’s newest state park) The water literally started shaking and one after the other these same planes flew up the length of the lake and right over us. It was not a pleasant experience. There were no markings on the planes that we could see. I sent a request to the ANG in BTV asking who or what this was. They did not bother to answer.
In my search for answers about this incident I developed a new appreciation for investigative reporting. Information is power. A uninformed public is a danger to our democracy. Thank you Taylor.
A couple of young pilots were feeling their oats. I wish they’d snuck up and scared the snot out of me, too. Life is boring without surprises. Next time please fly over North Hero, boys, providing if you didn’t get your wing commander so jacked he grounded you.
Have someone check the “sectional ” chart for that area. If you see a thin grey line with the letters “VR ” and a number, you have a low-altitude training route passing through that area. The VR means Visual Route and it can be flown as low as 500ft AGL (above ground level). It it about a mile wide and can be flown at high speed. One of them, VR1800 is used frequently by the VT Air Guard and passess over my home in West Chazy, NY.
We have seen these planes, plus helicopters, over Lake George on a regular basis. They come down the lake and disappear to the south.
Military pilots do not engage in frivolous “joy flying” because the penalties for doing so, endangering civilians, themselves and their taxpayer-owned planes, are severe. It isn’t worth destroying their careers, possibly lives and the perceptions of others for such an act. Written as a former Air Force officer and someone who knows how to fly airplanes. While they may appear to be “not benign” unless you are immune to reason and rational thought (i.e., a ReHitler voter), this is simply what it is: training.
There are several low-level Military Training Routes in that area, and C-130s are authorized to fly off those routes as well so long as they properly plan to avoid obstructions and do thorough route planning. They can fly as low as 300 feet for most C-130 variants except over certain environmentally sensitive areas like National/State Parks, etc. The only coordination required is if it involves an actual MTR, then the crews have to schedule with the unit that owns the route. If they arent flying a published MTR, no coordination is required other than filing a flight plan. Nothing really to worry about, honestly.
Four Fans of Freedom! Go Guard
Hey Pitmon, I hear Afghanistan is lovely this time of year. You should visit. Maybe even get a ride over there from the National Guard. Don’t worry, they wont hit the Afghan Mountains on their approach to land with you on board because they are all trained up from their cowboying around in Vermont. But I would wear a flak jacket on approach.
Large aircraft at 500-1000 feet look Very low to the untrained eye.
Keep training hard. It keeps us free!
Training to keep America safe and sound so you can sleep at night in your beds without fear of another nation’s army kicking in your door. You’re welcome.
These professional military aviators were executing a textbook 300 foot AGL (Above Ground Level) modified contour low level route profile, mitigating sparsely populated areas by at least 500 feet AGL and/ or 1 NM lateral separation, enroute to either a drop zone or landing zone, within a 1 minute Time on Target. There isnt time for sowing oats or cowboying at that altitude in a formation, nor would there be with a full crew of combat qualified Airmen. These are highly skilled military personnel who dedicate their time and efforts to ensure that they can infiltrate and exfiltrate hostile areas anywhere in the world to resupply war fighters and evacuate the wounded without damaging a multi-million dollar major weapons system. Though you may feel like they were trimming the branches of your oak trees, you are incorrect. If you are unhappy with the noise of these aircraft, or if it ruffles your sense of security, you can contact the Wing that operates them, provide them your location, and they will mark your residence on their low level charts to avoid it. The assumption that operating a large combat transport aircraft within 300 feet on terra firma in a careless or reckless manner is absurd.
I am 45 years old and this has been going on for as long as I can remember. All of a sudden this is a shocker to people! Last time I know the military forces have to train in different situations because they are put in different situation!!! This is not real news people!!! Just saying
Ladies and gentlemen. I hate to disturb your peaceful lives. But this is how we train. PERIOD!!!! And if this bothers you, you are more welcome to fly into Afghanistan, Syria and all the other combat areas yourselves. We are not crashing and we generally do not go lower than 400ft. So a lil buzz over your town for your freedom to sit on the lake or the patio then you are welcome!!!!!
Merica!!!!!!
I live near Cambridge Vt and I heard the planes overhead and rushed outside and was mad as hell.. not because I was scared, not because they were low and loud. I was mad that I wasn’t quick enough to see them.. I knew they were Military and they were training..Any rational person would know that. Even I know that flying these big crafts you don’t “cowboying around,'” she said. “I think they were having some fun and they were flying really low and buzzing around, and it panicked a lot of people out here.”. These men know what they are doing and you don’t cowboy with these planes. They aren’t toys !!! As many on here said. FREEDOM !! Makes me feel safe knowing they are around. They can fly over my place anytime they want. oh, no one around here was in a panicked..
We saw these two aircraft fly directly over our job site near Mount Snow (Dover, VT) I suspected they were from MA or CT. We caught them flying northward around 1:00 PM or so. Pretty cool as they were flying very close together.
Stunning how many commentors would like us to blindly trust our military in this day and age, as if the last fifty years hadn’t happened.
60 feet? Really? No. Not even close. Seven Days, you can do better. An article ripe with speculation from unqualified sources. This isnt journalism. Reference guideline #4 (Be Honest) in your comment guidelines section.