Fight and flight: with 25,000 in uniform and thousands of civilian employees, military aviation is a $4 billion industry in North Carolina.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Feature

Storms bring early dusk. From out of the distant gloom, piercing white lights seem to float down like flares. Gradually, the silhouette of an airplane takes shape behind them, skimming the runway. There's an explosion, like thunder. Orange flame erupts from the afterburners of its twin engines, and in seconds, the jet catapults skyward into the clouds, approaching its maximum speed of Mach 2.5 -- more than 1,650 mph.

"It gets a little noisy," says Lt. Col. Chris Ross, an Air Force weapons officer on F-15E Strike Eagle fighters, watching pilots practice touch-and-go landings. "The afterburners are pretty loud if you're not used to them, but we call it the sound of freedom."

Goldsboro is in the farm country of Wayne County. On its outskirts lies Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. As Lt. Beverly Mock drives through it, she points out gymnasiums, homes, softball fields, a Blimpie and a Burger King, a commissary -- grocery store -- and federal prison, whose 500 mostly white-collar inmates maintain the small city that's home to 5,200 airmen and 98 jet fighters, among the world's fastest and deadliest.

Military aviation is a major industry in this state, one that links North Carolina closer to global affairs and tensions than any other. Aviation as a tool of war grew up and matured here, taking root soon after what happened on Kill Devil Hill 100 years ago. Six years after the Wright brothers first flew, the Army, partly at their urging, bought its first airplane and assigned it to the Signal Corps for observation duty. Twenty years after the first Wright flight, Gen. Billy Mitchell bombed a ship, sinking it off Cape Hatteras to make his point that airplanes would dominate warfare of the future.

Today, more than 25,000 military personnel, plus thousands of civilian employees, fly or maintain the planes and helicopters of the Air Force, Marine Corps, Army, Navy, Coast Guard and National Guard in North Carolina. The economic impact -- by some calculations, $4 billion a year or more of payrolls, contracts and other spending -- is growing. Much of that change can be seen and felt on the flight lines of Tar Heel air bases.

Start here, standing a few hundred yards from a runway at twilight. The fighters and crews at Seymour Johnson are closer to the front lines than most can imagine. F-15 aviators such as Ross can wake up in Goldsboro and by nightfall, after a globe-spanning flight refueled by KC-135 airborne tankers such as those parked on the opposite...