Air Force to Start Fielding MH-139 at Malmstrom, Maxwell in March

Feb. 9, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

While the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester continues to have concerns about the MH-139 helicopter, the Air Force is on the verge of finishing developmental testing of the aircraft and fielding it at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont.; and Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.

The Grey Wolf will complete developmental testing this month and arrive for fielding at Malmstom in early March and Maxwell in mid-March, an Air Force Life Cycle Management Center spokesman told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Earlier, Detachment 3 of the 58th Operations Group stood up Jan. 31 at Maxwell to serve as the MH-139’s formal training unit. Eight months prior, the 550th Helicopter Squadron was activated at Malmstrom.

Maintainers have already started preparing for the aircraft with 30-day visits to Picayune, Miss., where civilian mechanics showed the Airmen how they maintain AW139s—the civilian version of the Grey Wolf.

Meanwhile, the first MH-139 production aircraft has finished assembly and is undergoing flight testing, a Boeing spokeswoman said.

For the first six months after the helicopters arrive at Malmstrom and Maxwell, units will focus on “mission-qualifying their aircrew, refining operational techniques and procedures, and incorporating the MH-139 fully into day-to-day wing operations,” the AFLCMC spokesman said.

After that, the aircraft will begin initial operational test and evaluation, a key step to reaching the full-rate production decision. IOT&E is scheduled to take place in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, the spokesman said. Most of that testing will take place at Malmstrom, he added.

The Air Force and Boeing reached a deal for low-rate initial production in March 2023, which will cover the first 13 production aircraft. In the long term, the Air Force hopes to buy up to 84 helicopters, which will be used by security forces patrolling the sprawling ICBM fields and at Joint Base Andrews, Md., for executive airlift.

However, the MH-139 has hit several setbacks in its development. Problems obtaining FAA certifications and the accompanying Military Flight Releases forced a yearlong delay in testing, and the 2022 report from the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation warned that the helicopter was at risk of not meeting “operational effectiveness requirements.”

Specifically, the report cited problems with the automatic flight control system, sensor display, and intercom system, along with its cabin layout and “restrictions on takeoffs in crosswinds or near obstacles.”

The 2023 edition of the report similarly warned that the program “faces several ongoing risks to … meeting operational effectiveness, suitability, and survivability requirements.”

While some progress has been made, the report authors noted that the MH-139 still requires some FAA certifications to start initial operational testing, which are not projected to be approved until the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024.

On top of that, the Air Force wants to add an additional radio to the aircraft, “but problems with internal communications persist,” the report stated. The service also is adding an environmental conditioning system, but that system’s effects on the helicopter’s power and weight requirements is not fully known.

Similarly, “expansion of the MH-139A operating envelope relative to the commercial AW139 baseline may stress powertrain components and increase maintenance requirements,” the report noted.

MH-139 mission planning is also currently being done on vendor-provided software that is not yet authorized to go on government hardware, meaning operating stations now require a standalone computer.

One problem the report noted—a restriction on austere landings while the program investigated engine ingestion of dust and debris—is seemingly resolved.

“The MH-139A successfully completed testing in a variety of unprepared surfaces, and there are currently no operational restrictions for austere landings,” the AFLCMC spokesman said.

New PACAF Boss: Actions Now Will Have ‘Long-Lasting Impacts’ in the Indo-Pacific

Feb. 9, 2024 | By Unshin Lee Harpley

Gen. Kevin B. Schneider took command of the Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), succeeding Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach in a Feb. 9 ceremony at Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, Hawaii.

Schneider, who comes to the job after a stint as director of staff, emphasized the strength and capability that comes from global partnerships during his first address—a key asset as the U.S. looks to combat China’s growing influence and power in the region.

“Those who seek to challenge us can never match it, they can only envy it,” Schneider said. “Our ability to work together has evolved from basic coordination to high-end interoperability in complex scenarios.”

Schneider has deep operational experience in the Indo-Pacific; he previously served as commander of U.S. Forces-Japan and the Fifth Air Force, as well as chief of staff for both PACAF and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Even going back to the 1990s, he served as an F-16 instructor pilot at Misawa Air Base, Japan, and Osan Air Base, South Korea.

Reflecting on his decades of service in the region, he pointed to significant changes in the security situation.

“It has become more challenging, it has become more severe, and it now carries a far higher potential for volatility,” Schneider said, expressing concerns about those seeking to undermine the rules-based international order in the Indo-Pacific theater. “They do it through economic coercion, political bullying, and military aggression. And the costs and impacts of those malign actions can be significant for those around the region. It comes with loss of sovereignty, comes with loss of transparency and government loss of economic freedoms and encroachment on human rights.”

Late last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly told President Joe Biden that Beijing intends to reunify Taiwan with mainland China, with only the timing remaining undecided. Meanwhile, a CSIS report in January counted the number of North Korea’s provocations as having tripled in the last three years.

“In the last year and a half or so, the world has become a very dangerous place,” said Wilsbach, who will go on to become the head of Air Combat Command.

“You can start with North Korea, and of course Russia is a Pacific nation as well. There’s issues in the Arctic, there’s even forces in Antarctica,” Wilsbach said. “And then of course, we have China, and China’s been very clear about their intent, their writings and their rhetoric are such that they want to control Taiwan. They’d love to do it peacefully, but they’ll do it by force, if they have to. And if you’ve watched what they’ve been doing with their military, they’ve been preparing to do it by force.”

Experts have expressed growing concern about the likelihood of China engaging in actual hostilities.

“Our job is to to convince them that that’s not a good idea. It’s called deterrence,” Wilsbach said.

Taiwan’s airpower got a recent boost when the USAF announced it had completed the $4.5 billion “Peace Phoenix Rising” program, upgrading 139 of Taiwan’s F-16 fighter jets to the advanced F-16V configuration. Next on the agenda will be 66 new F-16s delivered within the next two to three years.

Stressing his commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific, Schneider underscored the significance of ensuring stability in the region.

“It’s not just for PACAF, not just the United States Air Force,” Schneider said. “It is a time of consequence for this region, and the world. And the actions we take now to ensure stability and deter aggression in the face of multiple growing challenges will have far-reaching, and long-lasting impacts.”

Davis-Monthan Begins Sending A-10s to the Boneyard

Feb. 9, 2024 | By David Roza

Nearly 48 years after the A-10 Thunderbolt II first arrived at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., the base started its long transition to a new mission set by retiring its first attack jet.

Built in 1982, tail number 82-648 taxied out of the 354th Fighter Squadron and into the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, also known as The Boneyard, for final maintenance procedures Feb. 6. The jet is the first of 78 A-10s at Davis-Monthan that will be retired over the next three to five years.

“The A-10 has been the symbol of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base for many years, and it will continue to be a symbol for the Airmen of DM, a symbol of their commitment, excellence, and service,” Col. Scott Mills, an A-10 pilot and commander of 355th Wing, said in a press release.

Since entering service in the 1970s, the A-10, also known as the Warthog, earned a reputation for busting tanks in Operation Desert Storm, saving friendly troops with precise close air support throughout the Global War on Terror, and bringing pilots home thanks to its rugged construction.

“The plane, coupled with our high-level training standards, are the reasons so many of our joint and coalition forces returned home to fight another day—because they had A-10s overhead covering their six, or employing weapons to save their lives when nobody else could,” Col. Razvan Radoescu, 355th Operations Group commander, said in the release.

An A-10C Thunderbolt II, aircraft taxis towards the 309 Aircraft Maintenance and Regeneration Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., Feb. 6, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Nicholas Ross)

But as the aircraft ages and the Air Force seeks jets that it believes can survive in contested airspace, the branch aims to retire its entire Warthog fleet by 2029.

As the A-10s depart, the Warthog squadrons at Davis-Monthan will shut down, starting with the 354th Fighter Squadron this summer and fall. Most of the pilots and maintainers who flew and worked on them will disperse to other fighter squadrons across the service, an Air Force spokesperson said. Many of them may end up with F-35 Lightning II squadrons.

“Perhaps the biggest draw of future maintainers will be in the F-35 community,” Col. Clarence McRae, 355th Maintenance Group commander, said in the release. “Airplanes are still going to break, and we are still going to fix them.”

At Davis-Monthan specifically, the A-10 mission is set to be replaced in part by the 492nd Power Projection Wing, a new kind of unit that encompasses all of Air Force Special Operation Command’s missions: strike, mobility, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and air/ground coordination.

The wing will be a mix of units gathered from across the country, including:

One MC-130J Commando II squadron from Cannon Air Force Base, N.M.

One OA-1K Armed Overwatch squadron from Hurlburt Field, Fla.,

The 21st Special Tactics Squadron from Pope Army Airfield, N.C.

The 22nd Special Tactics Squadron from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.

The 492nd Theater Air Operations Squadron will activate at Duke Field, Fla., and transfer

Davis-Monthan will also gain five HH-60W helicopters from the 34th Weapons Squadron and 88th Test and Evaluation Squadron, which will relocate from Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. The moves will occur slowly over five years and pending an environmental impact analysis.

Pentagon Acquisition Boss: B-21 Was Designed for Budget Survivability Too

Feb. 9, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

The B-21 Raider was structured for a low production rate to make it less vulnerable to budget cuts, Pentagon acquisition and sustainment chief William LaPlante said Feb. 8, in comments suggesting the bomber may never be produced at high rates.

LaPlante, speaking at a virtual RAND event, said the B-21 program “was designed to be resilient to Washington turbulence.” LaPlante was the Air Force acquisition executive who oversaw the plan for the Long-Range Strike Bomber, the contract for which was awarded to Northrop Grumman in 2015. The LRS-B was later named the B-21.

The B-21 program was mapped out in the wake of upheaval in the F-35 fighter program, which suffered a Nunn-McCurdy breach due to rocketing development costs and difficulty producing the fighter at planned rates, LaPlante said.

“A lot of the painful lessons of the F-35 were applied to the B-21,” he said. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who also spoke at the RAND event, has described the F-35 as the product of “acquisition malpractice.”

One of the problems with the F-35, LaPlante said, was that “we had this gigantic production. And if you don’t hit the ramp,” or achieve the necessary rate of production, “the price won’t come down, and the learning won’t happen. So you had to hit that ramp,” When the F-35 didn’t reach the expected maturity on time, annual buy quantities were sharply reduced.

This was happening during the time of the Budget Control Act, which imposed a sequester on the Pentagon, LaPlante noted. The sequester compelled the services to make heavy cuts.

“What do you think was attacked by the budgeteers? Unfortunately, the [F-35] ramp. So every year the ramp is doing this,” LaPlante said, gesturing down with his hand.

“And of course, our fear was, you reach a point where it would go into a death spiral,” if F-35 maker Lockheed Martin couldn’t produce enough airplanes to get the unit price down. Generally, if production quantities are high, cost per unit comes down, because development and overhead costs are spread over a larger number of units. But if quantities are reduced, overhead costs are spread over fewer units, and unit costs go up.

“That never happened, thankfully, but we were worried,” LaPlante said.

With that experience fresh in mind, the B-21 was structured so “there’s no big ramp. It’s like this,” LaPlante said, gesturing with his flat hand angled only slightly upwards.

The message to budgeteers about the B-21, he said, was “stay away, don’t touch me. Because we want to make it resilient.”

The first five production lots of the B-21 amount to only 21 airplanes. By contrast, the B-2 bomber factory was built to produce 132 aircraft fairly rapidly, but Congress drastically reduced and then terminated the program after only 21 had been built, raising that aircraft’s unit cost to nearly $2 billion each.

LaPlante said he was not being critical of budget analysts who had to find the congressionally-demanded cuts during the sequester, but noted that “Washington turbulence,” usually translates to delays, restructures and hence higher program costs.

“So you can learn and you can design these programs to try to be survivable, given all the climates that we’re talking about, but you have to really think hard,” LaPlante said.

LaPlante didn’t elaborate further about the secretive B-21, observing that “there’s limits about what we can say publicly about it for very good reason.” But his remarks indicate that the program is structured to produce aircraft at a very low rate, even after initial learning lots.

The B-21 is slated to replace the B-1 and the B-2 by around 2032, as Global Strike Command has said it can’t afford to field four kinds of bombers at once. Combined, the B-1 and B-2 fleets now number 64 aircraft, assuming the B-1 that crashed in early January is not repaired or replaced. To fully replace those aircraft by 2032 would require an average annual production of eight B-21s per year.

However, some Air Force officials have said privately they would like to get the B-21s built faster, both out of operational need and because the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter and Collaborative Combat Aircraft will be in high-rate production in the early 2030s, competing with the B-21 for production money.

The Air Force initially pegged the B-21 planned inventory as “80-100 aircraft,” and in recent years as “a minimum of 100 aircraft.” Various think tanks, as well as former heads of Global Strike Command, have said that the service needs upwards of 150 B-21s, and perhaps as many as 225 of the bombers, to maintain the operational tempo needed in a potential future conflict with a peer adversary like China.

LaPlante approved the award of the B-21 low-rate initial production contract late last fall, after the first test aircraft made its first flight in November. The company had to achieve first flight—as well as other, undisclosed production milestones—in order to receive the LRIP contract, the amount of which was also not revealed.

“This past fall, based on the results of ground and flight tests and the team’s mature plans for manufacturing, I gave the go-ahead to begin producing B-21s at a low rate,” LaPlante said in a January statement to Air & Space Forces Magazine.

He also said that “one of the key attributes of this program has been designing for production from the start—and at scale—to provide a credible deterrent to adversaries. If you don’t produce and field to warfighters at scale, the capability doesn’t really matter.”

It isn’t clear whether eight aircraft per year, or slightly more, constitutes “at scale.” The Air Force has never revealed the expected peak production rate for the B-21, but service officials have noted that increasing the rate would require investing in more tooling and a bigger workforce. Northrop has cited workforce as one of the limiting factors in getting the first B-21 into flight test. It took the company nearly a year after the late 2022 public rollout of the bomber to achieve first flight.

WATCH: Lockheed Martin Is Accelerating Tech Readiness in Space

Feb. 9, 2024

Maria Demaree, Vice President of National Security Space for Lockheed Martin Space, joined Air & Space Forces Magazine to discuss acceleration of tech readiness in space, such as new ways of powering satellites and Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

‘The Guardian Spirit’: Montana’s Only Space Force Unit Wins Polaris Award

Feb. 9, 2024 | By Patrick Reardon

The Space Force’s Polaris Awards annually recognize Guardians who best represent the Guardian Spirit. There are four individual award categories based on each of the core Guardian values—Character, Connection, Commitment and Courage—and a Team Excellence category that combines all four values. Air & Space Forces Magazine is highlighting each of this year’s winners before they receive their awards on stage at the 2024 AFA Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colo.

The U.S. Space Force selected the 22nd Space Operations Squadron (22 SOPS), Detachment 1 at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., as the winner of the Polaris Award for Team Excellence for embodying all four core Guardian Values—Character, Connection, Commitment, and Courage—in 2023.

A small team with fewer than 20 Guardians, 22 SOPS, Det 1, installs, operates, and secures the secure global network (SGN) in support of the U.S. Space Force and mission partners across the national security enterprise. Despite being 70 percent manned, the group executed more than 1.1 million patches and 16,000 tickets for more than 6,000 customers in 2023.

As the only Space Force unit in Montana, Detachment 1 has made its presence known in the state’s local civilian communities.

“In Gen. Saltzman’s C-Notes, he talks a lot about telling our story and about the importance of the relationship between the military and the civilian populace,” said Maj. Jared Myers, the detachment’s commander. “So [when] we received this strategic intent from our CSO, we felt like it was everybody’s job to be an ambassador for the Space Force.”

Throughout 2023, the detachment volunteered at 13 separate DOD STARBASE and Stem2Space events where they highlighted the importance of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to more than 400 elementary school students.

Tech. Sgt. Joshua Bennett, 22nd Space Operations Squadron, Det 1, space operations technician, leads a STARBASE STEM class in front of a group of local elementary school students at the Montana Air National Guard Base, Feb. 2, 2023. STARBASE is the premiere Department of Defense science, technology, engineering and math program, offering 25 hours of education to 5th graders across the country. U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Elijah Van Zandt

Outside the classroom, the detachment helped install the Space Force seal at the Montana Veterans Memorial and presided over a Veterans of Foreign War ceremony where they helped raise the Space Force flag. Volunteers from the team also helped organize and participated in local state park and highway cleanups.

“I think the word got out in the community that our unit was kind of ‘hush hush’ and secret, but that doesn’t mean our presence needs to be hidden,” Myers said. “We really did make our name this past year and showed that, yeah, the Space Force is real. It’s important. Our country needs it. And being good partners with our community is a big piece of that.”

The unit’s amplification of the Guardian spirit was just as palpable on base as it was off. At Malmstrom, members of Detachment 1 voluntarily served as mentors for Airman Leadership School students, dedicating more than 50 hours to help train the local Security Forces in close-quarter battle, tactical communications techniques, and marksmanship.

Members of the 22nd Space Operations Squadron, Detachment helped install the Space Force seal at the Montana Veterans Memorial. USSF photo.

The detachment also served in key positions in Space Force working groups, including one focused on career field education and training plans, and another for the Enterprise Talent Management Office. They also contributed to Space Operation Command’s One Guardian Tiger Team, providing support to help streamline inter-service transfers as new members cross over to the Space Force.

In pursuit of personal improvement within the detachment itself, the team implemented its own professional development program. During monthly and weekly team meetings, the detachment spent more than 128 hours discussing the structure of the Space Force and Joint Force, the geopolitical terrain, and space operations’ role in keeping up with the nation’s pacing threats.

“Being at such a low echelon of a detachment, a lot of my folks weren’t sure how the service fits together, even things like, ‘What’s the difference between a combatant command and a service?’” Myers said. “So it really brought up some great questions, and was a great opportunity to impart some fundamental knowledge, especially to my NCOs.”

Myers said his team looked for every opportunity to expand its knowledge and expertise. The detachment sent members to Space Flag, a tactical-focused exercise for space warfighters, and to Space 100, a professional military education course, where the detachment earned an 80 percent unit completion.

“I am very proud of the team for everything that they did, especially being alone and unafraid at a geographically separated unit,” Myers said. “Each held their own and did the right thing. So [the Polaris Award for Team Excellence] is super exciting. It’s a very deserving team.”

Meet the other 2023 Polaris Award winners below:

Polaris Award for Character: Tech. Sgt. Isabel Childress

Polaris Award for Connection: Lt. Col. Jessica Pratt

Polaris Award for Commitment: 1st Lt. Jonathan Novak

Polaris Award for Courage: Capt. Samantha Pereira

Detangling the ‘Web of Networks’ with HII’s Mission Partner Environment Solution

Feb. 9, 2024 | By Patrick Reardon

The Department of Defense has a “web of networks” problem: Reliance on the Joint Force’s current warfighting network, SIPRnet, has driven the combatant commands to create more than 80 distinct information-sharing systems. Because these systems are not integrated or interoperable, rapid digital communication at the speed of mission need between the Joint Force, commands and the nation’s allies is not guaranteed—a clear and present danger to multinational mission capabilities, rapid integration of assigned forces, and combat effectiveness at the tactical edge.

HII Mission Technologies, a global, all-domain defense provider, is developing a materiel solution to consolidate the complex web of networks into a single, DOD enterprise framework known as the Mission Partner Environment (MPE) Future State. This will modernize mission partner information sharing, providing data exchanges at machine-to-machine speeds to support human-to-human collaboration and decision-making. The Secretary of the Air Force’s Mission Partner Capabilities Office is leading the effort to deliver DOD MPE capability.

“MPE is really a capability framework,” said Lee Davis, a senior program manager for Mission Technologies’ Cyber, Electronic Warfare and Space business group. “It’s a software-defined digital environment that allows and enables secure, global information-sharing capability between the Department of Defense and its mission partners, to include our foreign allies and partners, to enable coalition operations.”

HII is approaching the MPE as a solution to a system-of-systems challenge that will improve “decision superiority,” allowing commanders across the joint force—at all echelons—to achieve their decision cycles much faster, share digital intelligence products in real time with foreign mission partners, and replace today’s manually-intensive processes, such as developing air tasking orders (ATOs).

That starts by taking the fight off a U.S.-only network, Davis said, because “tomorrow’s fight is a coalition fight.”

“Enter Mission Partner Environment as a sensor-to-shooter enabler,” he said. “In the [MPE], that coalition battle staff will be digitally connected … on the same network, enabling them to generate products at digital speeds as opposed to manually sharing products, and thereby [they can] achieve decision superiority. In other words, getting that [air tasking order] out in mere minutes, certainly not hundreds or thousands of hours.”

Davis said the MPE will break the traditional mold of sharing capabilities between the U.S. and its partners. Instead of “bolt-on fixes” for allies, the MPE will provide two game-changing advantages for coalition warfare.

The first is what Davis calls “common technical requirements,” a set of interoperability standards that will be “baked into” the MPE acquisition strategy from the outset and agreed upon between participating partner nations.

The second key advantage is scalability. Davis said the MPE is designed with “plug-and-play interoperability” from the expeditionary level to the enterprise level. The MPE will eliminate today’s industrial age net-centric roadblocks by providing a data-centric architecture, a more modern and cyber secure approach to delivering information at the speed of mission need.

“Whether I’m a warfighter in CONUS in a training environment, or deployed on a U.S. naval ship in an area of responsibility, or even offshore at a forward operating base, I can get access to that network and its data to meet my mission need,” Davis said. “The architecture is going to be built to accommodate information age levels of data volume we see now … across the entire architecture backbone, all the way from a CONUS location … to the tactical edge.”

HII recently took full responsibility for operating and maintaining the DOD’s Pegasus network, a secure information-sharing network between the nations in the Five Eyes Alliance. This is an important U.S. coalition capability that will eventually transition to an MPE-compliant Enterprise Management Framework.

The Air Force and DOD stakeholders are still defining the MPE future state. Beyond simply building the program’s architecture, the migration and integration process must be mapped out to avoid interrupting current operational capabilities at combatant commands. While the timeline is being determined, Davis said HII is busy gearing up for the revolutionary transition and proposal response to the anticipated government MPE solicitation.

“We’re building out our industry partner ecosystem [and] capitalizing on the engineering and architecture work that we’re currently doing,” he said, “so we can remove those [information data silos and the web of networks issue] from that future architecture design.”

F-16 Pilot Earns Trophy for Saving Jet With Smooth Belly Landing

Feb. 8, 2024 | By David Roza

An F-16 fighter pilot was recognized on Feb. 7 for saving his aircraft from a near-disastrous mishap two years ago. While taking off from Aviano Air Base, Italy on March 2, 2022, Maj. Brady Augustin felt his F-16 settle to the left on the runway. Too fast to abort, Augustin took off and rose to 10,000 feet so he could better assess the situation.

After contacting ground support, Augustin believed he had a blown tire, and he prepared to land using the runway’s arresting system. The arresting system is a cable that an aircraft can catch with its tailhook in an emergency, similar to the way Navy and Marine Corps aircraft land on aircraft carriers.

But as the pilot prepared for landing, an airfield management team made a startling discovery: a left main landing wheel still on the runway. Augustin was told to fly a low pass so the control tower could check out his landing gear. Turns out, he didn’t just have a flat—he was actually missing the tire entirely.

Without much gas left in the tank, Augustin had two options: eject or land the Viper on its belly. Belly-landings are a risky procedure, but Augustin is no stranger to stressful situations. In 2020, he received the prestigious Lt. Gen. Claire Lee Chennault Award for his work spinning up Aviano F-16s and Airmen for a no-notice deployment to the Middle East in just nine days, a process that normally takes months.

Now Augustin had to nail a life-or-death task and do his best to preserve an expensive aircraft. Murphy’s Law, the principle that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, had already struck a few times that day, but Augustin managed to put the jet down safely and with remarkable style.

A video of the landing appeared on the popular, unofficial Facebook page Air Force amn/nco/snco, where the videographer and several commenters praised Augustin’s smooth touchdown. Even more impressive, the pilot managed the landing with a combat load, including a bulky electronic countermeasures pod and other equipment hanging from the jet’s wings and belly.

“I’ve seen plenty of video of gear-up landings and this one was executed very well,” Gregg Montijo, a former A-10 Warthog pilot, told Task & Purpose at the time.

Nearly two years later, Augustin was given the Koren Kolligian Jr. Trophy by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin in a ceremony at the Pentagon on Feb. 7. The namesake of the award was an Air Force first lieutenant who went missing off the coast of California on Sept. 14, 1955, along with the T-33 training jet he was flying at the time. The annual trophy is the only individual flight safety award personally presented by the Air Force chief of staff.

“Maj. Augustin showed incredible skill and ingenuity in a difficult and dangerous situation,” Allvin said at the ceremony, according to a press release. “He was calm, cool, and collected—exactly what we have come to expect from our aviators and all the Airmen who have earned the prestigious Kolligian Trophy.”

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin poses with Maj. Brady Augustin after presenting him the 2022 Koren Kolligian Jr. Trophy during a ceremony at the Pentagon, Arlington, Va., Feb. 7, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Eric Dietrich)

Kyle Anderson, a member of the Kolligan family, echoed Allvin’s opinion.

“What may have seemed like any other day in your [Augustin’s] life, we view as an act of heroism resulting from the Air Force’s commitment to education, training and safety—and your skill, composure, and resilience under pressure,” he said.

For his part, Augustin seemed just as grateful for the training.

“It was an incredibly unusual circumstance that had a lot of different ways that it could have gone poorly quickly,” he said. “But due to the exceptional actions by the team at Aviano Air Base in Italy, we were able to salvage [it into] a somewhat normal crash landing and save an airplane, and we all made it home that night.”

Guard Chief: First Ukrainian F-16 Trainees Are ‘On Track,’ But Funds Aren’t There for More

Feb. 8, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

The first four Ukrainian pilots training to fly the F-16 at Morris Air National Guard Base, Ariz., are “on track,” the head of the National Guard Bureau said Feb. 8, and the first batch of pilots are funded to complete their schooling. But Gen. Daniel R. Hokanson told the Pentagon press that Congress must authorize more funding to add additional pilots to the training queue.

Ukrainian pilots arrived in the U.S. to train to fly F-16s in September, first at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, for a crash course in English, and then beginning in October at Morris Air National Guard Base, Ariz., home of the 162nd Wing, where the day-to-day mission is focused on training foreign pilots to fly F-16s.

The U.S. and its allies expect the Ukrainian Air Force to achieve initial operating capability with its F-16s by the end of 2024, according to Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Celeste Wallander, who said pilot training was on track.

Hokanson echoed Wallander’s assessment, but added the caveat that without additional funding, things could change in the coming months.

“Everything we see right now, they’re on track,” Hokanson said. “Obviously as we get further on to higher levels, they may be more advanced or less. But we look at each pilot individually, because what we want to do is prepare them, as much as possible before they go back to Ukraine, to be successful.”

Pilots at Morris complete the six-month “B Course”—or Basic Course—to become proficient in the fundamentals necessary to transition to the F-16. That is the course the four Ukrainian pilots are now undergoing, a defense official previously told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Hokanson’s senior enlisted advisor, Air Force CMSgt. Tony L. Whitehead added that maintainers currently being trained on the F-16 will get resources to help them over the long term.

“Our standard operating procedures and [operating instructions] are translated for those maintainers, so they can make sure that the continuity of training can continue when they go back to Ukraine,” he said.

Such resources will likely be crucial, as officials and observers alike have noted that maintaining F-16s inside of Ukraine will represent a major effort in and of itself.

Building out a corps of F-16 pilots and maintainers takes time, though, and while Ukrainian personnel are also training in Denmark, the possibility of expanding training in the U.S. appears unclear.

“We do have the resources to continue the training that has already started … and hopefully get all of those folks completed later on this year,” Hokanson said. “Then if we decide to increase that, then obviously we’ll need the resources to train additional pilots and ground support personnel.”

Hokanson did not specify where such resources would come from, but lawmakers in Congress are currently locked in a heated debate on Ukraine funding. On Feb. 8, the Senate took a procedural step to advance a massive foreign security aid package that includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and more. However, that bill’s fate remains uncertain in the House. Lawmakers must also pass a budget for the federal government by early March or risk a shutdown.

Previously approved funding for Ukraine ran out in late January.