Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) on Thursday urged Air Force Secretary Michael Donley to station an additional eight C-17 transports with the New York Air National Guard’s 105th Airlift Wing in Newburgh, south of Albany. Her proposal would increase the total number of C-17s slated for beddown at Stewart ANG Base to 16. Stewart “is the ideal place to base an additional eight C-17s,” she stated in a release discussing the letter that she sent Donley on this topic. The 105th AW is scheduled to lose its 13 C-5As as the Air Force retires some of the C-5A fleet. To replace them, there are already plans to bring eight C-17s to Stewart. However, Gillibrand wrote Donley that the base “is the perfect candidate” for more C-17s and “has the infrastructure, personnel, and community desire” to accommodate the extra eight.
The Defense Innovation Unit is gearing up for the first flight of its commercially developed hypersonic testbed as soon as the end of February—part of a larger project to quickly increase the cadence of the Pentagon’s hypersonic flight testing and field advanced, high-speed systems and components at scale.
