Well-known black world project watcher and former AW&ST editor William Scott has alerted me to a recent AOPA e-newsletter which carries an unusual piece about an even more unusual airfield - Nevada’s Air Force Flight Test Center, Detachment 3 (AFFTC Det 3), more popularly known as Groom Lake, or Area 51.

According to the newsletter article Don’t ask, don’t tell: Area 51 gets airport identifier the field has been appearing in flight-planning software and on handheld GPS receivers as KXTA. As well as suggesting KXTA could stand for ‘extraterrestrial’, the newsletter called the (relatively) nearby Nellis AFB on the edge of Las Vegas for comment. “We already know and it doesn't matter," said a public affairs official there, it reports.

“The Jeppesen FliteStar flight-planning program and AOPA's Real-Time Flight Planner even identify it as Homey Airport and add, "Private, VFR, No Fee, Customs Info Unavailable." Well, there's a fee. The airport is deep within heavily restricted airspace, guarded by fighter jets. First come the legal fees, the probable confiscation of your aircraft, and a personal fee in the form of jail time or worse,” says the newsletter.

In a story with so many twists, turns and blind alleys, the moniker of “Homey Airport” for the lakebed site is a new one to me. Historian Pete Merlin’s excellent review of the Groom Lake facility (see www.dreamlandresort.com) refers to earlier identities such as Paradise Ranch, Watertown and of course the 1958 establishment of Area 51 into which the airfield was subsumed with the expansion of the Nevada Test Site.

According to Pete, the ‘Homey’ designation also crops up in the TAWS database. Here are a few other previous identities for the ‘place with no name’, also courtesy of Mr. Merlin.

• Detachment 1, 1129th Special Activities Squadron. This was used by the operating unit mainly during the timeframe from 1960 to 1968, when the base was called Area 51, but it also appears for some years afterward on Nevada Test Site security regulations.
• Home Plate and C-Base were nicknames used mainly by security personnel in unencrypted radio communications, rather than calling out the actual name of the base.
• Pittman Station. If asked where they worked, Air Force personnel were told to say "Pittman Station, Henderson, Nevada." This was derived from the original mailing address at the now defunct Pittman Postal Station.
• The base has also been referred to informally as "Out of Town," "Out at the Range," "Elsewhere," "St. Elsewhere," "Nowhere," "The Test Site," or simply "The Site."

Pete’s history page also contains a reference to what was assuredly the first GA pilot to wander into this most secret of spots. In July 1957 a certain Edward Current became the first civilian pilot to land there when he diverted during a cross-country flight due to low fuel. The pilot, who worked for Douglas Aircraft Company, was held overnight, questioned and released – the interrogation team presumably having determined he was not looking for transonic design tips for the fledgling DC-8, then less than a year from first flight.

For those of you without access to your own aircraft, a desire to be arrested, or both, the only real way to glimpse the very distant AFFTC Det 3 site is from the summit of Tikaboo Peak. Here are some photos taken from a visit I made to the spot late last year:

Groom Lake is barely visible in the far distance, in the middle of the picture.

The lunar-like terrain on the edge of ‘Area 51’.

Tikaboo Peak’s USGS survey marker – it’s official!