F
EW LOCATIONS ARE as
important to US naval aviation
as NAS Fallon, located in a
remote corner of northern
Nevada, about an hour east of
Reno. The small farming
community here has been boosted by
the manpower that the adjacent airfield
demands, with some of the navy’s most
important tactical training being
conducted on the sprawling range
complexes to the east and south of
the field.
Pivotal to all flying activities at Fallon is
the Naval Aviation Warfighting
Development Center (NAWDC,
pronounced ‘nor-deck’) which serves as
the umbrella organization for a number
of specialized training and tactical
support branches. It takes in the ‘HAVOC’
electronic attack weapons school and
the famous TOPGUN Strike Fighter
Tactics Instructor (SFTI) course.Fallon’s bad guys
— a VFC-13 F-5N
is hunted down
by instructors
from the famous
TOPGUN school in
their F/A-18C and
F/A-18F adversary
aircraft.http://www.combataircraft.net // June 2018 81
80-83 Fallon C.indd 81 19/04/2018 15:36