The U.S. Air Force has given the go-ahead to change its annual Angel Thunder combat search-and-rescue exercise, based at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, resulting in smaller events twice a year.
The Air Combat Command released a โfinding of no significant impactโ Tuesday as part of the final environmental assessment for the Angel Thunder Personnel Recovery/Rescue Training Exercise.
The next Angel Thunder is scheduled to start Saturday, May 6, and run through May 20, using range sites across Arizona and the Southwest.
The environmental assessment, required under the National Environmental Policy Act, was issued for a public comment period beginning March 3 and ending April 4.
The document can be viewed online at www.dm.af.mil.
Had the Air Force found a significant impact, a deeper โenvironmental impact statementโ would have been required.
First held in 2006, Angel Thunder is billed as the worldโs biggest joint-service, multinational, interagency combat search-and-rescue exercise designed to provide personnel-recovery training using scenarios to simulate deployment conditions.
The Air Force is revamping the exercise by holding the event two times per year instead of once, and reducing the size of the individual events.
Angel Thunder, last held in 2015, is now planned to take place in May and November this year, with about 30 aircraft and up to 1,000 airmen, about a third of the size of the prior annual exercises.
About 600 of Angel Thunderโs roughly 800 expected flights for each biannual event are expected to be flown from Davis-Monthan, which is home base to several combat-rescue units and A-10 Thunderbolt II close air-support jet squadrons.
The final environmental assessment included hundreds of comments from stakeholders, including area residents. The plan was generally supported by local and tribal governments, business groups and state and federal wildlife agencies, with some concerns about bird nesting sites at a few training ranges.
But some citizen commenters vehemently objected, saying the plan would add to military overflights from D-M that are already too noisy, pose health and safety risks, affect home values and degrade their quality of life.
Opponents included plaintiffs in a pending federal lawsuit to stop D-M from expanding its program hosting visiting-aircraft training, including the wintertime Operation Snowbird. The suit was filed in January 2016, after the Air Force issued a โfinding of no significant impactโ for the proposal in 2015.
