Home to Start a New Mission

Audio of this article is brought to you by the Air & Space Forces Association, honoring and supporting our Airmen, Guardians, and their families. Find out more at afa.org

About 200 members of the New York Air National Guard’s 174th Fighter Wing returned home to Syracuse, N.Y., on Aug. 5, along with 14 of their F-16 fighters, after several months of supporting combat operations in Iraq out of Joint Base Balad. The deployment was the wing’s eighth and final rotation to Southwest Asia as an F-16 unit; since, as part of BRAC 2005, it is now ending its 51-year fighter mission to transition to operating MQ-9 unmanned aerial vehicles. It will be the first ANG unit to operate the armed MQ-9, which the Air Force has used in combat in Afghanistan since September 2007 and since last month in Iraq. The transition to the MQ-9 starts this fall, but unit members are not expected to actually begin training on the unmanned systems until 2010 and to receive their own MQ-9s in 2011. (NGB report)

Audio of this article is brought to you by the Air & Space Forces Association, honoring and supporting our Airmen, Guardians, and their families. Find out more at afa.org