Full military honors accompanied the Oct. 10 burial at Arlington National Cemetery of the remains of 1st Lt. Shannon E. Estill, Army Air Forces airman killed in World War II. The Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native, was lost during a mission April 13, 1945, when his P-38J Lightning was hit by enemy antiaircraft fire in eastern Germany. A Pentagon release said that his remains could not be recovered after the war because his aircraft crashed inside the Russian-controlled sector of occupied Germany, an area then inaccessible to US military forces. A team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command investigated a crash site near Elsnig in 2003, and a second team, in 2005, excavated the site, finding human remains and P-38 wreckage.
The Air Force on March 12 awarded contract modifications worth a combined $2.4 billion to Boeing to procure an undisclosed number of E-7 Wedgetail as part of the program's engineering and manufacturing development phase and continue work on the airborne battle management aircraft’s radar.