Telephone workers narrowly missed by firing Navy jet

Thursday, Oct. 30, 1997 | 10:13 a.m.

Anne McMillin, Fallon Naval Air Station spokeswoman, said the pilot may have mistaken the tower for his assigned target during a training exercise on Wednesday.

The tower is located on the Navy's Bravo 20 aviation training range, 35 miles north of Fallon.

The tower was hit by 20 mm ammunition. A piece of metal from the tower fell and dented a camper shell on the workers' pickup, but the workers were not injured.

The pilot is an aviation student assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron 125, based at Lemoore, Calif. His name was not released.

Churchill County Telephone Worker Leonard Travis was working on a phone mounted on a fence that surrounds the tower when the inadvertent attack occurred.

"It happened so fast, we didn't have time to be worried about it," Travis said. "Only afterwards, you imagine what could have happened. It wasn't important."

His partner, Clark Skinner, said he had no ill feelings against the Navy.

"Nobody was hurt and I don't want to blast the Navy about it. It's no big thing."

But the director of a military watchdog group said the incident shows a lack of control by the Navy.

"Civilians are out there doing work and jets are strafing? What kind of controls do they have out there?" asked Grace Potorti, of the Rural Alliance for Military Accountability.

"This goes along with the sonic booms in Austin and the Navy's inability to stay within their operations areas," she said. "They can't control their people and they continue to prove that .. They hot-dog out there all the time."

A Navy investigation continues, McMillin said.

"They are looking at how it happened, why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again," she said.