Personnel of the 59th Medical Wing from Lackland AFB, Tex., airlifted seven-year-old Meaghan Ababa from Hawaii to Los Angeles in what her doctors describe as a “miracle” flight. The girl had been placed on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine to aid her failing heart and lungs, but the doctors in Hawaii couldn’t perform a heart transplant should it be needed. Moving a patient on an ECMO machine is tricky, so the doctors enlisted the help of a specialized team at USAF’s Wilford Hall Medical Center to undertake the eight-hour flight aboard a C-17.
The Air Force awarded a $13.08 billion contract to the Sierra Nevada Corporation on April 26 for its Survivable Airborne Operations Center aircraft, the successor to the service’s E-4B “Doomsday” plane. Like the E-4B, officially called the National Airborne Operations Center, the SAOC will be meant to withstand a nuclear attack and keep…