Author Kristin Davis

Thirty-four years ago on this night, a group of children came upon an empty patrol car, siren light spinning, a the gate of what was then Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. The car’s driver was reportedly found screaming inside the locked cockpit of an F-105 on display nearby. Base engineers spent four hours cutting him out. Or so the story — recently re-posted on the Defense Video and Imagery Distribution System — goes. “To this date,” according the news article first published in 1997 in the base newspaper, “no one has been able to explain how he got…

It was a moment worthy of instant-replay. During the first half of Sunday’s NFL game between the Arizona Cardinals and Washington Redskins, Air Force Capt. Erick Straub popped the question to girlfriend and Cardinals cheerleader Claire Thornton. She said yes. The sidelines proposal was caught on the jumbotrom, eliciting thunderous applause from the crowd at the University of Phoenix Stadium, according to news reports. The Cardinals went on to win the game. Congrats to the happy couple!

Elmo has been making the rounds lately. Last night, he hobnobbed with Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show.”  And on Monday, he met with the Air Force’s top general. The furry red monster appeared this week alongside Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh and wife, Betty, on photos posted to social media. The chief had this to say about the Sept. 8 meeting: “We had some special visitors to the Pentagon today…thanks to Elmo and Rosita as well as the incredibly talented folks from Sesame Street for stopping by and helping us share a message with a very important audience –…

Her gut told her to turn around. Airman 1st Class Ashli Harris was returning to Laughlin Air Force Base, Texas, from visiting family in San Antonio the morning of July 14 when a glimpse in the rear-view mirror told her something wasn’t quite right. “I knew I had a choice, to keep going or turn around,” she said in an Air Force news release.  Harris took the next exit off I-410 and made a U-turn. Back on the freeway, she saw a car stopped on the side of the road. Harris pulled over and got out. That’s when she saw…

The finalists for this year’s American Airman Video Contest tell stories from Alabama to Australia to Afghanistan. They are medical sonographers, security forces airmen, cyber systems operators, musicians and EOD technicians. The Air Force, which on July 1 called for short “selfie” videos from airmen, has whittled down the entries to 13 finalists. You can vote for your favorite through Aug. 22. “Every Airman has a story — and smartphone technology now allows those Airmen to share those stories with a wider audience than ever before,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III said in a statement. The airmen…

Two months later, the events surrounding the fire in Master Sgt. Lonnie McBride’s Northern Virginia condo building still seem surreal. The Air Force reservist nearly ignored the faint wisps of white smoke in the breezeway and the far-off sound of an alarm early on the morning of May 19. It was 6:30 a.m., and McBride had a 9 a.m. meeting to get to in Delaware, a two-hour drive away. Someone had probably just burnt their breakfast, he figured as he continued from his third-floor condo to his car at the bottom of the stairwell. But as McBride tossed his bags…

The remains of an airman recovered in 2012 from a six-decade-old crash site in the Alaska mountains are now home. Airman 3rd Class Howard Martin, of Elwood, Indiana, was one of 52 service members who perished in the Nov. 22, 1952 crash — and one of only 17 whose remains have been identified since an Army National Guard crew discovered the unearthed wreckage during a training mission two years ago. The C-124 Globemaster came to rest on a glacier and disappeared under an avalanche of rock and snow after flying into a mountain during a winter storm. The melting glacier…