Air Force
$1,827,659,806
The Medal of Honor: 150 Years of Valor
In 1861, Iowa Senator James Grimes proposed a medal to honor the bravery of Navy personnel, which Abraham Lincoln signed into law 150 years ago today, Dec. 21, 1861. That following summer, Lincoln signed authorization for an Army …
“Respond to Query Only”
Americans often believe government bureaucracy often prevails over common sense. This certainly happened to the Air Force earlier this year, when it sought to avoid embarrassment by curtailing its workforce’s communications …
Bullet Dodged
Pilot Error
The Air Force released a pair of probes into high-profile airplane accidents last week. Both play peek-a-boo with that phrase aviators hate: pilot error.
The first blames an F-22 pilot for crashing as he apparently – and …
Godspeed, Mr. Withington
The last man present at the birth of the Air Force’s B-52 – which, God bless the BUFF, is still flying real-world missions nearly 60 years after its first flight – has died at 94. Not only did Holden Withington help create …
Is This Any Way to Run a Country?
Afghan Education: Both Sides Now
In good news on the Afghan education front, the U.S. Air Force is hailing the first undergraduate pilot training held exclusively inside Afghanistan in more than 30 years. “Members of this first Afghan air force pilot training …
The Final Raptor…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__-FDXTizbs]
F-22 tail number 4195 rolled off Lockheed Martin’s Marietta, Ga., assembly line on Tuesday. It was the 187th, and last, of the fifth-generation super-stealth fighters to be built. When the program began – the first F-22 rolled off the line in 1997 – the Air Force said it …
Grim News: Reaper Down
A week after the U.S. lost a drone over the Afghan-Iran frontier, the Air Force announced Tuesday morning that one of its MQ-9 Reaper drones crashed at the Seychelles International Airport earlier in the day. “The MQ-9 was not …
$134 million
Here’s Looking At You, Kim
In a not-so-subtle full battle-rattle feather-flash toward North Korea, a flock of U.S. F-16s readies for war in full nose-to-tail “elephant walk” mode at South Korea’s Kusan air base. “What we’ve done today is essentially …