Col. Gregory Jones surpassed 4,000 flying hours in the F-16 fighter during a training sortie from Luke AFB, Ariz., on Jan. 8. “I’ve been lucky in that I’ve consistently been assigned to jobs that included flying the F-16,” Jones said in a Luke release. He is currently serving as operations group commander of Air Force Reserve Command’s 944th Operations Group at Luke. Jones flew his first F-16 sortie during type conversion training at Luke in 1990. Jones is one of only 42 other F-16 pilots in the Air Force to log more than 4,000 hours in the type, including one other at Luke—also a Reservist—said Col. Kurt Gallegos, commander of AFRC’s 944th Fighter Wing.
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning Service from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.