On May 25, 1961, Brigadier General Barnie B. McEntire Jr. was departing Olmsted Air Force Base in Pennsylvania — where he had attended a conference about the F-104's dangerous engine failure record — when the engine failed on takeoff over the Susquehanna valley. The Lockheed F-104 was a notoriously difficult aircraft - sleek, fast, unforgiving, nicknamed the "missile with a man in it." Below him was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a city of about 80,000 people. He had time and altitude to eject and let the airplane fall where it would. He did not eject. He stayed with the controls, glided the dying jet east, and put it into the Susquehanna River. He died in the crash. The Susquehanna swallowed the airplane. Five months later, on October 16, 1961, the South Carolina Air National Guard renamed its base in his honor.
The airfield itself is older than the Guard mission. The U.S. Army began construction in 1942 on flat farmland north of the Congaree River, as an outlying field for Columbia Army Air Base. Three 4,500-foot runways were finished on January 31, 1943. The base went by several names - Congaree Army Airport, Fort Jackson Airdrome, Congaree Army Airfield - while serving as a dive bomber training facility for the Army Air Forces. In April 1944 it transferred to the Navy, becoming Marine Corps Auxiliary Airfield Congaree on July 10, 1944. Four F4U Corsair squadrons of Marine Aircraft Group 52 trained here through the rest of World War II, with regular deployments south to Parris Island for live gunnery practice. By November 1945, all the Marine aviation units had moved on to MCAS Cherry Point in North Carolina.
The South Carolina Air National Guard had been formed in December 1946. It took over the base, and through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s flew a procession of fighters that read like a Cold War aviation timeline: P-51 Mustangs, F-80 Shooting Stars, F-86 Sabres, F-102 Delta Daggers, F-104 Starfighters, A-7 Corsair IIs, and now the F-16 Fighting Falcon. The 169th Fighter Wing's primary flying unit is the 157th Fighter Squadron, the Swamp Foxes - named for Francis Marion, the Revolutionary War partisan commander who outwitted British troops in the same Carolina swamps two centuries earlier. The squadron has deployed to combat in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Pilots who fly out of McEntire often live in the surrounding Columbia suburbs and come home to their families between deployments - one of the things that distinguishes a Guard fighter unit from a regular active duty wing.
Today about 1,250 people work at the base. Roughly 900 are traditional Guard members who train one weekend a month and two weeks a year, holding civilian jobs in between. About 300 are full-time federal employees, the technicians who keep the airplanes ready. About 50 are state employees. The 169th Fighter Wing is augmented by an active-duty associate squadron, the 316th Fighter Squadron, in a model that has become common - Reserve component units flying alongside active Air Force pilots on the same airframes. The base also hosts the 245th Air Traffic Control Squadron, capable of deploying mobile air traffic control to expeditionary sites. The South Carolina Army National Guard's 59th Aviation Troop Command operates UH-60M Black Hawks and AH-64 Apache helicopters from the same field.
McEntire is about 12 miles east-southeast of downtown Columbia and about 5 miles from Congaree National Park. Pilots flying patterns over the field can see the dark canopy of the bottomland forest to the southwest. The base does not host commercial traffic - it is military only - but the F-16 noise signature is part of the local soundscape, the sound that says the Swamp Foxes are training again. Brigadier General McEntire's name remains on the field, the way Air Force bases tend to keep their dead. He chose, sixty-five years ago and a thousand miles away, to die rather than let his airplane fall on a city. The base has been carrying his name since 1961.
Located at 33.9208 degrees N, 80.8011 degrees W in eastern Richland County, South Carolina. ICAO: KMMT. The field has Class D airspace; expect heavy military traffic, including F-16 and Black Hawk operations. Pattern altitude varies; check NOTAMs and current ATIS frequency before transit. Nearby Class C airspace for Columbia Metropolitan (KCAE) sits 12 nautical miles west. The Congaree National Park is just 5 nautical miles southwest - please maintain altitude per park overflight guidance. Best aerial viewing from outside the controlled airspace at safe distance, with appropriate clearance. The runway complex is recognizable from above by the standard military airfield layout and ramp full of F-16s when units are home. Eastover sits 10 miles east of the base.