Daily Report

The House Appropriations Committee is slated to mark-up the Fiscal 2009 defense spending bill today and one of the items to watch is the fate of funding for the Air Force’s portion of the Joint Cargo Aircraft program. The Hill...

We’re told that the Air Force still intends to host its nuclear summit next Thursday (Sept. 18), likely at Bolling AFB, D.C. But now, instead of a venue where service leaders roll out the implementation plan for rebuilding USAF’s nuclear...

More than 125 airmen of the 14th Airlift Squadron at Charleston AFB, S.C., just returned from a four-month deployment to Southwest Asia, where they carried out more than 3,000 missions in their C-17 transports, logging nearly four thousand hours of...

The Air Force Thunderbirds air demonstration team and the 364th Recruiting Squadron partnered together last month to conduct the largest swear-in ceremony to date of delayed-entry recruits. During the Aug. 30 swear-in at the Travis Air Expo 2008 on the...

Air Force engineers with the 557th Expeditionary RED HORSE Squadron in Iraq are teaching former Iraqi insurgents in the town of Hawr Rajab, a former al Qaeda stronghold, basic construction skills so that they may rebuild their communities and learn...

The world’s highest resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite, GeoEye-1, was successfully placed into orbit by a Delta II rocket that was fired from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., on Sept. 6. “Based upon the data we saw, the satellite is performing properly,” Bill...

The last flying Douglas C-133A Cargomaster transport aircraft touched down at Travis AFB, Calif., Aug. 30 where it will now rest in static display. C-133s operated from Travis between 1958 and 1971. “The arrival and retirement of the C-133 here...

Air Force Office of Scientific Research-sponsored researchers are creating a virtual reality environment that would allow numerous UAV operators to interface with it to control multiple, semi-autonomous UAVs effectively and without current limitations in areas like situational awareness. This environment includes advanced physical- and eye-tracking systems and voice interfaces. It also features a large field of view and an innovative information display that shows the air vehicles in flight, the surrounding airspace and terrain, and information from the UAVs’ instruments, sensors, and weapon systems. “We are also exploring new ways to employ virtual reality to address the challenge of time lag that is characteristic of applications where machines are operated at a distance,” said James Oliver, Iowa State University lead researcher on the project. (AFOSR report by Maria Callier)

Despite the heavy rains of Tropical Storm Hanna that blanketed much of northern Virginia, the Centennial of Military Aviation celebration took place Sept. 6 at Ft. Myer, Va., to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of a series of flights made there...

Air Sorties in the Global War on TerrorismSept. 6-7, 2008 Sortie Type OIF OEF OIF/OEF Total ISR 58 30 88 CAS/Armed Recon 99 84 183 Airlift 260 260 Air refueling 116 116 Total 647 OIF=Operation Iraqi Freedom OEF=Operation Enduring Freedom...