The completion by Electronic Systems Center of a five-year, $70-million program to replace 110 weather sensing systems around the globe means the Air Force will need fewer observers and can stop trying to patch nearly 40-year-old mechanisms. Chuck Paone reports that ESC worked with Coastal Environmental Systems of Seattle, Wash., to install the FMQ-19, which is a collection of weather sensors that collect data, putting it into a common format and transferring it to a base weather unit. They installed the last one at the airfield of the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing in Southwest Asia earlier this month.
In a dramatic flare-up in the hostilities between the U.S. and Iran, American forces struck and destroyed five Iranian oil tankers Sept. 8, U.S. Central Command said. Iran retaliated by lobbing ballistic missiles toward a major U.S. base in Jordan.
