Airfield team stays busy at deployed location

  • Published
  • By Capt. Mae-Li Allison
  • 379th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
SOUTHWEST ASIA (AFPN) --  Airfield management at one forward-deployed air base in Southwest Asia involves doing more than just filing flight plans and telling pilots where to park.

Master Sgt. Carlos Marrero, the chief of airfield management, and his staff also ensure the smooth and efficient movement of aircraft in the area and safety on the ground.

“Our motto here at airfield management is ‘my airfield, my domain’,” said Sergeant Marrero, who is deployed from MacDill Air Force Base, Fla. “We are responsible for the safety of people, vehicles and aircraft on and near the airfield.”

Sergeant Marrero and his staff accomplish this by performing periodic checks of the airfield during the day. As the airfield manager, Sergeant Marrero is required to perform one thorough airfield inspection daily.

“I’ll drive on the runways and taxiways, checking them for cracks, the presence of foreign object debris, blown-over signs, rubber deposits, lights and unauthorized objects on the sides of the taxiways, such as aerospace ground equipment,” he said. “We also work closely with civil engineering to sweep (foreign objects) off of and fix problem areas on the airfield.”

At the office, two people on Sergeant Marrero’s staff coordinate transient aircraft parking, as well as receive and transmit flight plans to the host nation’s air traffic control center.

Sergeant Marrero keeps busy submitting work orders to both fix existing problems and expand the current airfield.

“In the month I’ve been here, I’ve submitted more than a dozen work orders,” he said. “One of the work orders is for expanding the transient aircraft parking area and another is for applying Environtach-50 or ‘rhino snot’ to the sides of all the runways and taxiways.”

Sergeant Marrero said “rhino snot” is a sticky liquid sprayed on the rocky and dusty areas throughout the airfield to keep foreign objects in place so they won’t damage aircraft.

The few people working in airfield management have been quite busy because of their depth of responsibility for the airfield.

“Sergeant Marrero works his tail off every day of the week resolving the never-ending list of challenges on the airfield,” said Capt. Clint McCommon, the airfield operations flight commander. “He and his team at base operations do a marvelous job of balancing a long list of daily duties requiring coordination with numerous agencies.”