In October 2025, three F-15 Eagles took off from Barnes Air National Guard Base in Westfield, Massachusetts, and did not come back. That was the end of eighteen years of Eagle operations by the 104th Fighter Wing.

One of the pilots in that final three-ship was Capt. Kyle Eckert, callsign Nuke.

On Sunday he stood on the same ramp as one of the wing’s first F-35A pilots.

The full circle

Unit conversions produce a lot of press releases and not much feeling. This one had a line in it worth keeping.

That is the whole transition in two sentences: the same pilot, the same ramp, eleven months and one generation of fighter apart.

What actually happened on 13 September

A small correction to some of the coverage, because it matters for anybody tracking the conversion.

The 104th’s first four F-35As reached Barnes on 11 June 2026. The 13 September event was the official welcome ceremony, marking the formal transition of the wing’s mission rather than the aircraft’s first landing. That is a normal sequence for an Air National Guard conversion, where jets arrive as aircrew and maintainers finish qualifying and the ceremony follows once the unit can actually employ them.

The groundwork went back further. The record of decision came in December 2024. Then came sunshades, F-35-specific support equipment, and the unglamorous business of retraining an entire maintenance group from a 1970s air superiority fighter to a fifth-generation strike aircraft.

Why a Guard wing gets the newest fighter

There is an old assumption that the Air National Guard flies whatever the active-duty force has finished with. That stopped being true some time ago.

Vermont’s 158th Fighter Wing was the first Guard unit to take the F-35A, and Alabama, Wisconsin, Florida and now Massachusetts have followed. The reason is geography: the units that sit alert over American cities are Guard units, and the aircraft sitting on those alert pads is the aircraft that would meet whatever arrives uninvited in US airspace.

Barnes runs one of those alert sites around the clock. Which is also why the standard Air Force line about the F-35 replacing ageing F-16s and A-10 does not quite fit here: at Westfield it replaced Eagles.

Two hundred and fifty years of it

The 104th traces its lineage to a National Guard first formed in Massachusetts more than two and a half centuries ago, which gives ceremonies like this a longer shadow than most unit conversions.

Representatives of the Kenyan and Paraguayan militaries were in the audience, both State Partnership Program partners of the Massachusetts Guard. Gen. Steven Nordhaus, Chief of the National Guard Bureau, told the Barnestormers they would be ready when the call came. Governors say chapters, generals say readiness, and the pilots mostly want to know when they get their first sortie.

Eighteen years is a long time to fly one aeroplane. The Eagle at Barnes outlasted several wars, a base realignment fight and more than one attempt to take the mission away. Its replacement will probably still be there in 2060, which is roughly the point Maj. Gen. Gary Keefe was making when he called the F-35 a cornerstone of national security for the next fifty years.

Sources: 104th Fighter Wing / DVIDS, Massachusetts National Guard, Defence Blog, aeroTELEGRAPH, WWLP.