The Air Force’s Active Duty component met its enlisted recruiting goal for the 14th straight year in Fiscal 2013, announced service recruiting officials. In all, it brought in 26,022 new enlistees and 253 prior-service members, according to a Nov. 26 Air Force Recruiting Service release. On the officer side, the Active Duty component hit specific targets for 32 chaplains, 736 medical officers, and 847 non-flying career slots, states the release. Special operations airmen, explosive ordnance disposal personnel, physicians, and linguists topped the service’s high-demand career fields in the fiscal year, states the release. In terms of quality, the officials noted that close to 98 percent of the recruits in the Delayed Entry Program scored at or above the 50th percentile in the standard Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery testing. (See also our coverage of the Air Force’s Fiscal 2013 recruiting figures across all three components.)
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.