The Air Force on Thursday planned to rectify a 65-year-old clerical error by presenting a Distinguished Flying Cross to former Army Air Forces first lieutenant Joseph Moser. The 87-year-old Moser was to receive his DFC during an awards ceremony at McChord AFB, Wash. Moser, who flew P-38s with the 474th Fighter Group, earned the DFC for a “highly successful bombing mission over a heavily fortified target on July 30, 1944,” states a Jan. 26 McChord release. Two weeks after that mission, Moser was shot down over Germany and held as a prisoner of war. The AAF misplaced the DFC paperwork and Moser never learned of the award until in the early 1990s when he read a squadron diary. (Read more in the McChord report and this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article.)
The Air Force is on track to reach its annual goal of graduating 1,500 new pilots that had proved elusive to this point, one year after the service launched a sweeping overhaul of its undergraduate pilot training program, Air Education and Training Command said Sept. 14.
