To the 74 airmen of the 35th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, Misawa AB, Hawaii, who deployed for Cope India 2006 to maintain USAF F-16s the pace has been “unreal” and the heat challenging, says SrA. Troy Herberholzt. Initially they had to improvise when some of their equipment was slow to arrive. Still, they managed to turn all 52 missions of the first three days with no maintenance cancellations. How do the Indian mechanics stack up? Well, for one thing, officers perform the bulk of maintenance on Indian Air Force fighters.
The Space Force on April 15 released two highly anticipated future-casting documents that describe what the service expects the space environment will look like in the year 2040 and lay out the force structure it thinks it will need to operate in that environment.