It was April 19 when the Air Force actually went over the one million mark for sorties supporting the global war on terror, service officials told the Daily Report Tuesday. We reported earlier that the service anticipated hitting that astonishing figure on April 21. Officials would not speculate which particular sortie or which aircraft and crew on April 19 actually broke the one million sortie mark.
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…