Jay Bolles Quotations

Mother Nature did not cooperate with us at all; we had four major hurricanes and four evacuations. The last hurricane literally put the entire base under two feet of water. There were employees who lost just about everything, but they've managed to get back together to where we are today.

I think that the teamwork shown by the program office, the Commander Navy Air Reserve Forces, VFC-13, Sikorsky and Northrop Grumman paints a really good picture and created a great partnership. A lot of people said there was no way that we were going to be able to pull this off and we did it. I don't take the credit, it was the team that accomplished this and it's a real success story.

As a matter of fact, the detachment just finished their first operational tasking flying air-to-air missions against Strike Fighter Squadron-106 (VFA-106) Super Hornets. They flew 158 flights in two weeks with eight aircraft.

The Navy tasked us with flying these adversary missions four to five times a year from NAS Fallon, Nev., but the costs of getting the adversary aircraft, pilots and maintenance staff out to NAS Key West was just getting too expensive. In order to save money we decided to establish a detachment of 12 jets permanently down in Key West.