“We’re certainly very proud of that,” Bill Butt, president of Butt Construction, said Wednesday.
Air Force officials have said the early availability will make it easier to move in hundreds of employees relocating from Brooks City Base, Texas, and other sites that are moving programs to Wright-Patterson, under decisions authorized in the nation’s 2005 BRAC process.
Thomas Wells, director of the 711th Human Performance Wing, sent an e-mail Wednesday thanking the contractors and others who oversaw the project.
“It is nearly a miracle that we were able to take possession of a facility this large and complex 89 days ahead of the original schedule,” Wells wrote.
The Human Performance Wing, a $194.5 million project, represents Wright-Patterson’s largest single construction project since World War II and is the centerpiece of the $332 million BRAC construction program. It will house the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, relocating from San Antonio, Texas, and a massive centrifuge that will be used to test human and equipment performance under multiple gravity pressures.
The first aerospace medicine classes in the new complex are to start March 28. The school has been convening classes since December at an interim site in the former Defense Electronics Supply Center in Kettering Business Park.
Trucks bringing equipment from sites in Texas and Arizona are on the road and will begin arriving at Wright-Patterson on Thursday, Wells wrote.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony is scheduled June 1. The HPW complex has been formally named for the late Harry G. Armstrong, a former Air Force surgeon general and pioneer in flight medicine. Armstrong helped design flight gear to protect air crews from harsh weather and to improve oxygen supply at high altitudes.
He also helped design the first U.S. centrifuge to allow scientists to investigate the effects on humans of increased gravity forces, according to the National Aviation Hall of Fame, which enshrined Armstrong in the hall in 1998. Armstrong died in 1983.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2242 or jnolan@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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