During SWAT team training this morning at Detroit's little-used City Airport, the prop-wash from a hovering Blackhawk helicopter managed to rip the facade off of the Detroit Police Department's helicopter storage hangar. Oops. Gallery below.

If you've flown through Detroit in the last couple years, you know that the recently updated and rebuilt Metro airport is one of the most fantastic, easy to get around, well-designed airports in the world. What you might not know is that there's another — much, much older and largely disused airport commonly referred to as City Airport. It was the city's first major airport and now smack dab in one of the nastier areas of the city and mostly relegated to freight and private air traffic. That's where today's shenanigans take place.

Apparently, as part of a regular Homeland Security training exercise, SWAT teams train regularly in the fine art of helicopter rappelling and as such use a military-provided Blackhawk helicopter as their perfectly good flying machine of choice to jump out of. This morning around nine, the training was going along as planned until the wash from the helicopter proved too much for the nearby hangar housing the Detroit Police Departments helicopters. The entire facade was blown off and came crashing to the ground, creating quite a mess. Cleanup crews were dispatched by mid-day, but there are no plans to change the training plan, the Blackhawk will be back tomorrow around 9 AM to continue tearing apart hangars training.

On a side note, we find it amusing that there's plenty of Federal money to run regular SWAT training operations in a city and state so hopelessly in the red that they'll be shortly slashing the budgets for police, basic city and state-run administrative departments and education funding.