The Air Force's top weapons buyer is worried the top-secret Next Generation Air Dominance program might become an “unintended casualty” of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lawmakers in the final draft of the fiscal 2021 defense policy bill are cutting $70 million from the NGAD program for ...
aviation
Two B-52s flew directly to the Persian Gulf from Barksdale Air Force Base, La., in what the military says is a message of deterrence to Iran. The bombers, from the 2nd Bomb Wing, took off from their home base Dec. 9 and integrated with other ...
The Air Force’s vision for the seamless, networked warfighting concept known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, is all about using information to dominate the battlespace: By interconnecting systems across every domain, U.S. forces would seek to increase the operational decision space for ...
A B-1B bomber on Dec. 4 released a JASSM stealth missile from its Sniper targeting pod pylon. The demonstration follows a captive-carry dress rehearsal in November, and paves the way for the B-1 to carry a variety of munitions, but especially hypersonic missiles, on external ...
Lawmakers want to quash the prospect of buying new armed overwatch planes for special operations troops or the Air Force in the next few years, as part of the final draft of the 2021 defense policy bill released this month. They seek to block SOCOM ...
The Air Force saw a total of 33 hypoxia-like events in its T-6A Texan II trainer fleet in fiscal 2020—a nearly 20 percent decrease from the fiscal year prior—Air Force Safety Center data obtained by Air Force Magazine shows. However, the rate of these events—defined ...
Lawmakers weighed in on three of the Air Force’s top-priority technology development efforts in the final draft of the fiscal 2021 defense policy bill, offering more money and more oversight as the programs mature. The Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology initiative, hypersonic weapons, and the Next-Generation ...
Three companies will move on to flight experiments as part of the Air Force’s Skyborg drone program, the service said Dec. 7. Kratos earned $37.8 million, Boeing earned $25.7 million, and General Atomics earned $14.3 million to continue on in the program, the Air Force ...
Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager died Dec. 7, at age 97. Yeager was a World War II fighter ace and most widely remembered as the first man to fly through Mach 1—the speed of sound—in 1947. He tested numerous research aircraft ...
A special tactics combat controller will receive the Air Force Cross on Dec. 10 for his actions in a 2017 battle in Afghanistan, where he is credited with protecting more than 150 friendly forces and destroying 11 fighting positions over the course of an eight-hour ...
As the final days of 2020 count down, House and Senate negotiators have agreed on sweeping defense policy legislation that offers nearly $732 billion to the armed forces in fiscal 2021. “The FY21 NDAA focuses on maintaining the strength of our defense enterprise as our ...
New Pentagon acquisition rules are making it possible to field the AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) hypersonic missile five years faster than would be possible under the old rules, top USAF uniformed acquisition official Lt. Gen. Duke Z. Richardson said Dec. 3. He also ...
