Officials with Air Force Reserve Command’s 315th Airlift Wing at Charleston AFB, S.C., recently held a ceremony to rededicate Building 60 on the base in memory of TSgt. Carl Church, an airman who died in 1974. Church, a native of Bucyrus, Ohio, was an Air Reserve Technician and a C-141 flight engineer assigned to the wing’s 701st Airlift Squadron. He died in August 1974 when his C-141 crashed while on a mission to La Paz, Bolivia. Building 60, which now houses the 315th AW headquarters, was originally named in Church’s honor in November 1975. But following a renovation in 1999, the building no longer carried the plaque dedicated to Church. Now it does once again, and it is the only building on the base named in memory of a Reserve airman. (Charleston report by SrA. Dani Pacheco)
Happy Birthday US Air Force: 78 Today
Sept. 18, 2025
Seventy-eight years ago today, on Sept. 18, 1947, Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred Vinson swore in Stuart Symington as the first ever Secretary of the Air Force, and the Air Force officially became the first new military service since the Revolutionary War.
