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Old 03-05-2023, 10:40 AM
  #5  
Excargodog
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“In the 1990s, they divested too many aircraft, they closed down too many pilot training bases,” she said. “They simply don’t have the capacity to produce the number of pilots that they need, and they don’t have the aircraft required to absorb the pilots they do create.”
Closed bases and surrendered airspace that will never come back. Too few too unreasonably expensive aircraft. It’s much like the rest of the Defense industrial base…

Ther once was a base called Mather AFB and the flyers out of there had a shoulder patch that said Air Training Command Headquarters West. At the time I think only two ATC bases were west of the Mississippi (Williams In Tempe, now also gone, and Mather itself).

I thought the whole HQ West thing was more than a little arrogant until I got to digging into the history. During WW2 there were apparently over 100 ATC bases in California alone.
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