For nine years in the 1960s, nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles sat on alert at Burlington. Today the same field hosts the first Air National Guard F-35 wing.
A Pirep featured story · KBTV Burlington International, Burlington, VT
In April 1956, the U.S. Air Force activated a new fighter group at Ethan Allen Air Force Base in South Burlington, Vermont. The 158th Fighter Group (Air Defense), assigned to the Vermont Air National Guard, had one mission: the air defense of Vermont and the northern flank of New England. Its flying squadron, the 134th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, drew its first aircraft from Air Defense Command stockpile — Lockheed F-94 Starfires.
Two years later, the F-94s were replaced by Northrop F-89D Scorpions. In 1960, when Ethan Allen AFB closed and the unit moved across the field to Burlington International Airport, the F-89Ds were replaced by F-89Js. The J was a remarkable airplane. It was designed to carry two AIR-2 Genie air-to-air missiles. Each Genie carried a 1.5-kiloton nuclear warhead, intended to bring down a Soviet bomber formation at twenty thousand feet with a single shot. From the early 1960s onward, the Vermont Air National Guard kept Genie-armed Scorpions on twenty-four-hour alert at Burlington.
The aircraft kept changing. F-102 Delta Daggers replaced the Scorpions. Then F-101 Voodoos. Then F-4 Phantoms. Then F-16 Fighting Falcons in the mid-1980s, an aircraft the 158th would fly for the next thirty-three years — intercepting Russian Tu-95 Bears off the East Coast during the late Cold War, escorting unidentified aircraft after September 11, and deploying repeatedly to the Middle East.
In December 2013, the Air Force announced that the 158th would be the first Air National Guard fighter wing to receive the F-35A Lightning II. The last Vermont F-16 departed in April 2019. The first two F-35s landed at Burlington on September 19, 2019. The wing was declared operational in 2022. In September 2022, Lieutenant Kelsey Flannery became the first female F-35 pilot in the Air National Guard. That same year, eight aircraft from Burlington deployed to Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany — the National Guard's first overseas F-35 deployment. In June 2023, on a NATO exchange, an F-35 from the 158th made the first American Lightning II landing in Austria.
The wing's nickname is unchanged from when it first received F-94s in 1956. They are still the Green Mountain Boys. The same squadron, the 134th, has been the flying unit at this field for sixty-nine continuous years.