Air Force personnel officials are encouraging Active Duty airmen who are eligible to re-enlist, extend their current enlistment, retire, or separate in March to complete these actions by Feb. 15 to avoid processing delays and military pay issues. That’s because the Air Force is upgrading and transferring MilPDS, the Military Personnel Data System, to the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Defense Enterprise Computing Center in March. This upgrade is scheduled to take about 23 days to complete, during which time MilPDS will not be available to airmen, states a Jan. 15 Air Force Personnel Center release. “Airmen who accomplish their re-enlistment or enlistment extension by Feb. 15 should not experience interruptions in their pay because their servicing [military personnel sections] can process all appropriate transactions prior to the MilPDS upgrade,” said Michael McLaughlin, AFPC’s re-enlistments branch chief. (Randolph report by TSgt. Steve Grever) (See also Jan. 14 Randolph report by Grever.)
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.