WASHINGTON — Argentina barred US C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft from landing or overflying during a Latin American tour by US President George W. Bush for fear they would get stuck there, the secretary of the US Air Force said yesterday.
"This is really a slap in the face to your America’s air force," Michael Wynne, the service’s top civilian, told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee weighing the air force’s US$110.7 billion fiscal 2008 budget request.
The C-5 fleet is built by Lockheed Martin Corp., the Pentagon’s biggest supplier. Designed to carry outsize and oversize cargo, it is one of the world’s largest aircraft and the backbone of strategic airlift in every US war from Vietnam through the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Bush toured Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico from March 8 to 14. It was not immediately clear why Washington sought landing rights in Argentina as part of the trip. The C-5 is sometimes used to ferry bulletproof limousines and other heavy cargo during White House missions.
"Right now, we’ve had an incident where Argentina refused to have C-5s land in their territory because the last time we landed C-5s there, they all broke down and they could not leave," Wynne testified.
He said Argentina also turned down overflight rights for the giant transports in a diplomatic note to the US Embassy tied to Bush’s Latin American tour.
Argentina’s Embassy in Washington did not return a telephone call seeking comment on Wynne’s account. Thomas Greer, a spokesman for Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed, said the company would not comment on an operational issue or incident involving the C-5, which it is upgrading and modernizing.
Wynne used the C-5 tale to illustrate what he called the problem of "geriatric maintenance" of the air force’s aging and increasingly unfit inventory of about 6,000 aircraft.
