Michael Army Airfield (MAAF) is a military

airport An airport is an aerodrome with extended facilities, mostly for commercial air transport. Airports usually consists of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surface ...

located at the

Dugway Proving Ground Dugway Proving Ground (DPG) is a U.S. Army facility established in 1942 to test biological and chemical weapons, located about southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, and south of the Utah Test and Training Range. Location Dugway P ...

and owned by the

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...

. It is west of the proving grounds barracks at Dugway,

Tooele County Tooele County ( ) is a county in the U.S. state of Utah. As of the 2010 United States Census, the population was 58,218. Its county seat and largest city is Tooele. The county was created in 1850 and organized the following year. Tooele County ...

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to it ...

, United States.

Overview

Michael Army Airfield is located in a secluded, distant location and the secretive nature of its missions are generally undisclosed by the Army. Built by the Army during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, as Dugway Army Airfield, the facility is located in the Dugway Proving Ground which is one of the Army's main facilities for developing defenses against biological and chemical attacks. Workers at Dugway test defense gear to make sure they can survive nuclear, biological and chemical attacks. MAAF is located just south of

Hill Air Force Base Hill Air Force Base is a major U.S. Air Force (USAF) base located in northern Utah, just south of the city of Ogden, and bordering the Cities of Layton, Clearfield, Riverdale, Roy, and Sunset with its largest border immediately adjacent to ...

's massive Utah Test and Training Range, where

F-35 Lightning II The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is an American family of single-seat, single-engine, all-weather stealth multirole combat aircraft that is intended to perform both air superiority and strike missions. It is also able to provide ele ...

fighters from Hill train in air-to-air combat and the Air Force tests cruise missiles, and is used occasionally by the Air Force as an emergency landing field. It has been called the "new Area 51" by some, with the Dugway Proving Ground serving as a buffer zone, as the Nevada Test Site served for

Groom Lake Area 51 is the common name of a highly classified United States Air Force (USAF) facility within the Nevada Test and Training Range. A remote detachment administered by Edwards Air Force Base, the facility is officially called Homey Airport ...

Projects

In the 1990s, MAAF was associated with the

NASA X-38 The X-38 was an experimental re-entry vehicle designed by NASA to research a possible emergency crew return vehicle (CRV) for the International Space Station (ISS). The 1995–2002 program also developed concepts for a crew return vehicle design ...

Crew Return Vehicle (CRV) program, for the

International Space Station The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA ...

. That program, however, was canceled in 2002 due to budget cuts. One frequently rumored test project is the

Lockheed Martin X-33 The Lockheed Martin X-33 was a proposed uncrewed, sub-scale technology demonstrator suborbital spaceplane that was developed for a period in the 1990s. The X-33 was a technology demonstrator for the VentureStar orbital spaceplane, which was pla ...

. It is undetermined if MAAF will be used in association with the

Boeing X-37 The Boeing X-37, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), is a reusable robotic spacecraft. It is boosted into space by a launch vehicle, then re-enters Earth's atmosphere and lands as a spaceplane. The X-37 is operated by the United Stat ...

Advanced Technology Demonstrator, the military derivative of the X-38, a classified project which was transferred from NASA to the

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

on 13 September 2004. In 2009, it was announced that Michael AAF will be used for the development and testing of

Unmanned Aircraft System An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without any human pilot, crew, or passengers on board. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), which includes adding a ground-based controller ...

s (UAS), which are sent overseas to provide soldiers with an aerial view - via video feed - of combat situations.

Facilities

Michael AAF previously had a runway which was in poor condition. An FAA airport diagram effective January 2008 shows a 7,000 by runway (12/30) open parallel to the prior runway, but the diagram effective February 2009 shows a new 11,000 by runway is open in place of the original runway.FAA airport diagram, effective 14 February 2008
/ref> As of 2013, 1,000 feet of each end of the runway is designated as an "overrun," leaving only 10,000 feet available for takeoffs and landings in each direction.

References

External links

* Pappalardo, Joe (October 2009)
New Area 51: Mojave's Desert Outpost Holds Space Flight's Future
Popular Mechanics. * * {{US-airport-mil, DPG United States Army airfields Airports in Utah Buildings and structures in Tooele County, Utah Great Salt Lake Desert Transportation in Tooele County, Utah

Overview

Projects

Facilities

See also

References

External links