The Air Force once again needs to find a few more good enlisted aviators. The service has opened retraining opportunities for airmen who want to move into one of eight aviator fields. Those fields open to first-term airmen are flight engineer, flight attendant, and aerial gunner. The service has openings for staff sergeants and technical sergeants that want to retrain as boom operators, flight engineers, loadmasters, aerial gunners, and specialists in airborne mission systems, airborne battle management, and cryptologic linguistics. Overall, USAF has about 900 slots open in areas where it has critical shortages. As in the past, the service wants to take volunteers from a group of NCOs it has marked as “vulnerable for retraining.” There are plans for an involuntary phase and beyond that separation, as the service continues to draw down to an end strength of 316,000 active duty members in 2009.
The top Air Force commander on on the Japanese island of Okinawa has clamped down alcohol and issued a curfew for junior enlisted Airmen and Guardians at Kadena Air Base for the next month. The order came roughly two weeks after a U.S. Marine was arrested for allegedly robbing and…