Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh has unveiled his annual reading list — 12 titles mostly recommended by you. More than 1,700 airmen wrote in over 10 days recommending favorite books and movies, enough, Welsh wrote in his opening message, to “fill a library … with amazing fictional, historical, and biographical works, along with fascinating ideas about personal and organizational values, growth, and success.” Topping this year’s book list is the 2012 “Air Commanders” by John Andreas Olsen. Part-military biography and part-operational analysis, the book tells the stories of 12 airmen who “shaped the central air campaigns in American history,”…
Browsing: Afghanistan
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S-HeOrg98c] The 455th Air Expeditionary Wing posted this interview with F-16 pilots who recount a recent close air support mission in Afghanistan. The pilots featured are from the 100th Fighter Squadron of the Alabama Air National Guard.
Showtime’s controversial CIA drama “Homeland” returned with a two-part episode Sunday night. And in the premiere, the Air Force plays a central role in a fatal airstrike that will clearly drive this season’s plot. Major spoilers for the premiere follow, in case you haven’t seen it yet. The episode begins with brilliant-but-unstable CIA analyst Carrie Matheson (Claire Danes) — now the station chief in Kabul — ordering a strike on a terrorist leader named Haqqani in the Pakistani tribal region. However, the CIA’s intel didn’t include the fact that Haqqani was at a wedding, and multiple women and children are killed…
Showtime’s controversial CIA drama “Homeland” returned with a two-part episode Sunday night. And in the premiere, the Air Force plays a central role in a fatal airstrike that will clearly drive this season’s plot. Major spoilers for the premiere follow, in case you haven’t seen it yet. The episode begins with brilliant-but-unstable CIA analyst Carrie Matheson (Claire Danes) — now the station chief in Kabul — ordering a strike on a terrorist leader named Haqqani in the Pakistani tribal region. However, the CIA’s intel didn’t include the fact that Haqqani was at a wedding, and multiple women and children are killed…
The Air Force on Sept. 2 honored 39 security forces airmen with the Air Force Combat Action Medal for helping fight off a pre-dawn Taliban attack on three bases. According to an Air Force release, the five-hour-plus battle began when Taliban-linked insurgents opened fire on the Afghan air force’s Kabul Air Wing, the U.S.-run Forward Operating Base Oqab, and a NATO base within the grounds of Kabul International Airport at about 4:15 a.m. on July 17. The attackers began by firing more than a dozen rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles from a multistoried building about 350 meters from the bases’ perimeter.…
Airmen filed in to watch the premiere of “Inside Combat Rescue: The Last Stand” at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, on June 11 before it aired on the National Geographic channel that weekend. Air Combat Command bases held advanced showings of the follow-up series to last year’s successful miniseries “Inside Combat Rescue,” which ran as the channel’s highest-rated new series for the 2012-13 TV season, according to TVbytheNumbers. The documentary follows a unique group of Security Forces airmen whose main mission is to go outside the wire and protect expeditionary bases. “Defending air bases is not just an Army job…
A group of six pilots and loadmasters with the Afghan Air Force flew the first C-130 mission by an all Afghan aircrew this week. On June 16, the aircrew flew cargo, 120 personnel and two casualty evacuation patients from Kabul to Kandahar and back. “With the use of the C-130, we have the ability to do so much more,” Afghan Air Force 1st Lt. Khail Shinwar, C-130 Hercules pilot, said in a news release on the mission. “We’ve supported the elections, our Afghan National Army soldiers, senior leadership and transport the injured on CASEVAC missions with this aircraft.” Air Force…
The last Stratotanker has left the Transit Center at Manas, Kyrgyzstan, ending 12.5 years of refueling operations at the base. The transit center’s last refueling mission landed Feb. 24, according to the Air Force. The KC-135, deployed from MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., flew for six hours, refueling A-10s and F-16s over Afghanistan. “It’s pretty special to be able to say that we were able to fly on the last sortie out of Manas,” said Col. Mike Seiler, the commander of the 376th Expeditionary Operations Group, according to a release. “When [I] think about it, we flew our last sortie…
Coalition airstrikes continued its trend of fewer bomb drops in Afghanistan, with 190 total for the month of October, down 42 from the month before. So far in 2013, there have been 1,283 total sorties with at least one weapons release, according to statistics released today by Air Forces Central Command. This compares to 1,975 total for last year. Other assets have remained busy. In October, there have been 23,458 total intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sorties, and 27,000 airlift sorties, which included 176,000 short tons of cargo and 448,000 passengers. Casualty evacuation sorties have remained low throughout the year, with…
Five airmen were killed in two separate crashes over three months. In both incidents, the pilots lost their spatial orientation in bad weather. This week’s Air Force Times looks at exactly what went wrong in the desperate last few minutes of both flights. Also this week, Air Force Times examines the 328-page report from the command-directed investigation stemming from Tech. Sgt. Jennifer Smith’s complaint about enduring years of sexual harassment. Ultimately, allegations were substantiated against two colonels, five lieutenant colonels and a captain. In other news, the gap in promotion rates between unmanned aircraft pilots and their counterparts in manned…
