ARTICLE

April 2004

Small Town in Pennsylvania Recovers–Slowly–from BRAC

by Harold Kennedy

As the nation braces for another round of military base realignments and closures in 2005, a small, former U.S. Navy facility just outside of Philadelphia, which closed its gates eight years ago, just now is recovering from the BRAC experience. The process, however, has been slow.

The Naval Air Warfare Center at Warminster, Pa., was the site of a Brewster Aeronautical Corporation factory that built fighters and bombers during World War II, After the war, the Navy took over the facility to develop and test aircraft.

In 1952, the world’s largest human centrifuge was installed to help teach pilots how to handle the heavy pull of gravity—G forces—associated with high-performance aircraft. Later, NAWC became a training facility for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs.

In the 1995 BRAC, however, NAWC was designated for closure. It went out of business a year later, and most of its programs were transferred to Patuxent River Naval Air Warfare Center, in Maryland, and Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Station, N.J. Many of NAWC’s 2,311 workers transferred to those locations; others retired.

Of the base’s 817 acres of land, 757 were turned over to the Bucks County Federal Land Reuse Authority for redevelopment. In 2001, Erickson Retirement Communities, headquartered in Catonsville, Md., received a $4 million federal economic development grant to build a gated retirement community on a 103-acre portion of the land.

Erickson planned to attract retirees drawn by the antique stores and art galleries in nearby New Hope and Doylestown, the scenic Delaware River, and the big city sophistication of Philadelphia.

The development—called Ann’s Choice, after a colonial-era settler—features apartments, a clubhouse, restaurants, shops, banking, all-season aquatic and fitness centers, medical facilities, and beauty salons. Since the grand opening in August 2003, nearly 300 residents have moved in. A third residential building, with 109 additional apartments, was scheduled to open in March of this year.

The community’s grounds are vastly different from the military days. The place is being landscaped much more intensely. Manmade ponds are being installed, and 3,900 trees are being planted.

Right next door to Ann’s Choice, Warminster Township received 243 acres for a new park. “It was a big deal for Warminster,” said Karen Whitney, the township’s director of parks and recreation. “It doubled the size of our park system. Just to give you some idea, our next largest park is 11.6 acres.”

The township used a $30,000 matching grant from the Keystone Grant program of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources to hire two engineering firms, Schoor DePalma and Pennoni Associates, to draw up a master site plan for the park. The plan calls for a new access road, parking, lighting, playgrounds, wildflower meadows, wetlands, trails for hiking and biking, dog park, pavilion, restrooms and maintenance facility.

The price for all of this ultimately could be as much as $52 million, the study estimated. That’s a pretty sizeable figure for a community as small as Warminster, which has a population of about 33,000, Whitney conceded. But she pointed out that the expense would be spread out over many years and would be shared by the many sport groups that will use the playgrounds.

The township conducted a grand opening of the facility—dubbed Warminster Community Park—in October. More than 8,300 residents attended the all-day affair, which included 15 different entertainment groups, an inflatable carnival, midway games, fire-safety demonstrations, a revolutionary war reenactment camp, an antique and specialty car show, food vendors and after-dark fireworks.

The county also turned 59 acres of the old base into an 850,000-square foot business park called the North American Technology Center. “Over the past couple of years, we have renovated and re-leased a large portion of the former Navy buildings on this site, bringing back hundreds of jobs to the local economy,” said Robert A. Bown, project manager for Industrial Investments Inc.

Bown’s company “specializes in purchasing large, pre-existing industrial properties, renovating them and converting into multi-tenant business campuses,” he told National Defense.

Industrial Investments was drawn to the site because it had good, sturdy buildings and a handy location, just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which runs east and west across the state, and Interstate 95, the main north-south corridor on the East Coast, Bown said. A third of the nation’s population lives within a day’s drive.

At present, the NATC is three quarters leased, he said. So far, the facility has attracted 13 primarily local tenants, including a commercial printer, a bakery that produces low-carbohydrate breads and rolls, and a medical transcription service.

A 150 foot-high ejection-seat testing tower on the grounds has been converted to use as a cell tower. “On top of it sits a Doppler weather radar dome for a Philadelphia television station,” Bown said.

The center still is seeking a new use for the centrifuge, which is known as the world’s first Dynamic Flight Simulator. “This very unusual piece of equipment was constructed, improved and maintained by the Navy to provide a facility to study the effects of very high G forces on human subjects,” Bown said.

“Our centrifuge has a 50-foot radial arm, a 16,000-horsepower drive motor and can reach 40 Gs, with onset rates of up to 13 Gs per second,” he explained. “It also was designed to allow for interchangeable fighter plane cockpit setups and to operate with a complete flight-simulation program, which is still intact.

“I do not think any other existing human centrifuge or flight simulator can match these specifications,” Bown said. The facility can provide “an entire class of training that is available in no other U.S. facility.”

The DFS was built in Warminster because of the solid rock foundation beneath of the surface of the land, Bown said. It is located in its own cylindrical building with massive, steel-reinforced, concrete walls.

As a result, the centrifuge makes amazingly little noise, Bown said. “I stood underneath it as it was going 15 Gs,” he said. “It was so quiet. It just whizzed over my head.”

The DFS is important, in part, because of the role it played in the nation’s space program, Bown said. “Most of the early astronauts trained on our centrifuge,” he said. Included were the astronauts who participated in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, such as Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, John Glenn, Frank Borman and Neil Armstrong. “This was truly a ‘Right Stuff’ type of facility.”

Because the space shuttle does not experience the high acceleration of early spacecraft during re-entry, today’s astronauts are no longer subjected to the kind of high G-force training available at Warminister, Bown said.

Human centrifuges and flight simulators of this quality, however, are rare, Bown said. Proposals have been made to turn DFS into a museum or a tourist attraction. “But that’s not our primary goal,” Bown said. “We’re commercial entrepreneurs.

“We’d like to find a long-term user–or purchaser–who can take advantage of these very unusual capabilities,” he said. Potential users might be defense contractors, university researchers, engineering schools, military services or friendly foreign governments.

“We want to see this facility used for what it was designed to do—train pilots and test equipment at high G forces,” Bown said.

As for the township of Warminster, its businesses continue to work with the Defense Department. In 2002, NAVMAR Applied Sciences Corporation won an indefinite-delivery and indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $25 million for a Phase III Small Business Innovative Research program. The contracting activity was the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Lakehurst.

In that same year, Ketron Inc., a division of The Bionetics Corporation landed a $5 million job to provide data reduction and analysis for the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Patuxent River.

In 2003, Magnum Inc. signed a $5.4 million agreement to work on C-17 nose docks at McGuire Air Force Base, N.J.

Meanwhile, Warminster’s new park has plenty of room for growth, Whitney said. “We still have a lot of open space.”

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