The completion by Electronic Systems Center of a five-year, $70-million program to replace 110 weather sensing systems around the globe means the Air Force will need fewer observers and can stop trying to patch nearly 40-year-old mechanisms. Chuck Paone reports that ESC worked with Coastal Environmental Systems of Seattle, Wash., to install the FMQ-19, which is a collection of weather sensors that collect data, putting it into a common format and transferring it to a base weather unit. They installed the last one at the airfield of the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing in Southwest Asia earlier this month.
The 301st Fighter Wing in Fort Worth, Texas, became the first standalone Reserve unit in the Air Force to get its own F-35s, welcoming the first fighter Nov. 5.