Partners in Kenya

Airmen from Massachusetts; New Jersey; RAF Lakenheath, England; and the Horn of Africa will come together at the end of June for a complex African Partnership Flight in Kenya. The event will focus mainly on personnel recovery training for Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian troops, but will also incorporate training on aircraft maintenance, airfield security and base defense, as well as medical outreach in the local community, Capt. Aaron Charbonneau, an intelligence officer with the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s 102nd Intel Wing and a planner for APF-Kenya, told Air Force Magazine. Personnel recovery instruction will include courses on combat search and rescue, survival and evasion principles, tactical combat casualty care, and personnel recovery command and control, Charbonneau said. After the courses are complete, the Kenyans have planned a personnel recovery exercise, which the instructors will observe and offer feedback on, he said. “We really try to look to the continent and the countries to really ask us what they need… we’re really trying to build up their own indigenous capability in order for them to self sustain,” Charbonneau said. However, he said, the event also helps in building lasting partnerships, he said, by “showing to them that we’re there to stay.”