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.
Anduril and General Atomics will develop their Collaborative Combat Aircraft for the Air Force, beating out Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, the service announced on April 24. But any of the non-selected companies can compete to actually manufacture the eventual design, the Air Force said.