Aircraft Total Active Inventory (TAI) as of Sept. 30, 2025.
AC-130J
Gallery of Weapons
The Air Force transformed a public freeway into a runway over the weekend, landing various tanker, cargo, and special operations aircraft on the road, including the service’s first-ever touchdown of an AC-130J Ghostrider on a U.S. roadway.
The KC-46A can now pass fuel to almost 70 percent of aircraft that request aerial refueling, Air Mobility Command announced. The newest aircraft on the list include C-130 Special Operations variants, the C-5M Super Galaxy, and the E-3G Sentry AWACS.
The Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) has been in development at Lockheed Martin since at least 2019, when the company received a contract for integration, testing, and demonstration of such a weapon on the AC-130J aircraft.
Lockheed Martin has completed factory acceptance testing and delivered a new laser weapon to the Air Force, the defense contractor announced Oct. 6, with the goal of mounting it on the AC-130J Ghostrider.
The crew of an AC-130J on June 22 received Distinguished Flying Crosses and Air Medals for protecting helicopters evacuating wounded American and Afghan forces during a September 2019 fight in Afghanistan. The Ghostrider, callsign Shadow 71, provided about two hours of constant close air support ...
The Air Force is asking to retire 201 airplanes and buy 91 new ones in its fiscal 2022 budget request, representing a net decrease of 110 airplanes. The fighter fleet would drop by 77 aircraft, and the RQ-4 Global Hawk fleet would be cut by ...
Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett wants to base the service’s MH-139A Grey Wolf Formal Training Unit at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., the Department of the Air Force announced Nov. 20. The same day, USAF announced that it wants to move its AC-130J Ghostrider Formal ...
The F-15E Strike Eagle can now carry the Small Diameter Bomb II in combat, after software faults and other problems repeatedly delayed the program for years. Air Combat Command approved Raytheon Technologies’ air-launched, precision-guided munition, also known as StormBreaker, for use on Sept. 23. The F-15E ...
Air Force officials are still looking to perfect directed-energy weapons to use against the low-tech threat of small drones before scaling up lasers and microwaves to take out cruise missiles. The Air Force’s high-power microwave weapon known as the Tactical High-Power Microwave Operational Responder, or ...
A year after the House Armed Services Committee passed its fiscal 2020 defense policy bill in an unusually partisan fashion, the panel appears to be taking a step back from major fireworks and aerospace programmatic shifts in its 2021 legislation. The full committee’s version of ...
