The Air Force has been using a pair of C-130 aircraft as crop-dusters over Utah, trying to eradicate halogeton. That’s a salt-loving, invasive weed that complicates the service’s bomb tests and can make recovering unexploded bombs more dangerous. The planes have been spraying 1,200 acres of the Utah Test and Training Range from about 100 feet at 200 knots. The Air Force Reserve’s 910th Airlift Wing, based at Youngstown Air Reserve Station, Ohio — home to the Department of Defense’s only large-area fixed wing aerial spray unit — is doing the work.
The crews add the blue dye to the herbicide so they know the areas they’ve already taken care of. Too bad they don’t have something like this to spray over Afghan territory the U.S. and its allies have taken from the Taliban to confirm the “hold” part of the “win, hold, build” strategy we’re using there. Come to think of it, the blue color lasts only about 48 hours before it begins to fade…
