Airmen of the 43rd Expeditionary Electronic Combat Squadron flew the unit’s 3,000th EC-130H Compass Call sortie May 19, a feat accomplished during five years of continuous deployment to operations in Iraq. The unit rotates airmen from its home base at Davis-Monthan AFB, Ariz., to provide communications jamming support to US and coalition ground forces. “I’m pretty impressed that we’ve been able to keep the pace up this long,” said Capt. Benjamin Jody, aircraft commander on the milestone flight. He continued, “It’s a testament to the maintainers out here that we’ve been able to do this many sorties in that amount of time.” (The unit passed 2,500 sorties last summer and 20,000 combat flying hours in February.) (386th Air Expeditionary Wing report by SSgt. Thomas Doscher)
The Air Force and Boeing agreed to a nearly $2.4 billion contract for a new lot of KC-46 aerial tankers on Nov. 21. The deal, announced by the Pentagon, is for 15 new aircraft in Lot 11 at a cost of $2.389 billion—some $159 million per tail.