Air National Guard safety officials recently visited the American Airlines flight training center in Fort Worth, Texas, and other civil aviation and government oversight facilities across the country to see how they could better incorporate commercial air safety practices into Air Guard operations, according to a release. “It’s no secret that many ANG pilots also fly for commercial airlines,” said Col. Ed Vaughan, ANG safety director. “What is not so well known is how valuable that civilian-military connection is to enhancing Air Force flight safety and spurring innovation,” he said. Among the stops, Vaughan and Dan Polanosky, ANG safety associate director, also visited the National Transportation Safety Board training academy in Ashburn, Va., states the Jan. 15 release. The Air Guard has adopted three commercial flight safety initiatives; one of them is the Aviation Safety Action Program, which encourages voluntary reporting of safety issues by pilots and airline employees as a means of preventing accidents.
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…