Air Mobility Command aircraft operating in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq were shot at 215 times in 2006, Gen. Duncan McNabb, AMC commander, told attendees at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium Friday. That’s the bad news. The good news is that a combination of tactics, techniques, procedures, and defensive systems mean that the aircraft were only hit six times, with no US aircraft shot down. McNabb noted, however, that enemy fire did bring down an RAF C-130 in late 2005.
Today’s armament maintainers are tasked with performing flightline (O-Level) maintenance with an assortment of legacy test sets that greatly limit the ability to quickly and efficiently verify armament system readiness, diagnose failures, and ultimately return the aircraft to full mission...