Calling him an “ordinary airman” who stepped up “to make a difference,” Lt. Gen. Norman Seip, 12th Air Force boss, presented the Airman’s Medal last week to Maj. Trace Steyaert at Ellsworth AFB, S.D. On June 10, 2007, Steyaert had rescued a swimmer caught in a rip tide and unable to swim back to shore at Thinker’s Beach near Monrovia, Liberia, where the major had deployed to support a US Army unit. Steyaert is with the 28th Logistics Readiness Squadron at Ellsworth. (Ellsworth report by A1C Abigail Klein)
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…