Free Republic

One of the hardest-working competitors to hit the field at the Super Bowl this weekend isn’t a football player — she’s a stunning Seahawks cheerleader who is also a first lieutenant in the US Air Force. Rookie “Sea Gal” Alicia Quaco, 25, works long days as a contract manager for the Air Force before rushing to evening cheerleading practice, where she trades camouflage fatigues for tiny shorts, glittery makeup and pompoms. “It’s a lot of costume changes. I don’t get to wear normal clothes very often. And I have hardly any free time,” she said.

Developed at the end of the 1960s to be the best air superiority fighter in the world, the F-15 proved to be a real MiG Killer during the Operation Desert Storm scoring most of the allied aerial victories. During the Air War over Iraq the mighty Eagle proved also to be a very robust airframe, bringing back its pilots also after suffering serious damages. After the first ten days of the first Gulf Air War, to avoid the destruction of their air force, Iraqis flew their aircraft to Iran and to prevent this “exodus” the U.S. Air Force was forced...

More than 12 years after launching development, a now-familiar scenario for the Lockheed Martin F-35 programme is playing out again: a team of outside government evaluators predict a major new delay for entry into operational service, while programme insiders insist that no such thing will happen. Only time will tell which side’s predictions prove most accurate, but the history of the F-35's thrice-delayed operational debut favours the Federal team. The latest debate focuses on the newly-released annual assessment by the office of Michael Gilmore, director of the office of test and evaluation (DOT&E). Last July, Gilmore told Congress that he...

For nearly a decade, an awkward debate has raged about the U.S. military's nuclear force: Did top Air Force officials really choose "00000000" as a code that could enable the launch of a nuclear missile? Ten years later, in a document obtained by Foreign Policy, the U.S. military told Congress that it never happened. But is the Pentagon telling the truth? Bruce Blair, a nuclear security expert and former launch officer , says no. Blair, now a scholar and author at Princeton University, first raised the idea in a piece published in 2004. He accused the Air Force of circumventing...

The senior enlisted airman at Offutt Air Force Base's 55th Wing was removed from his position earlier this week, base officials acknowledged Friday. Chief Master Sgt. William Thomaston Jr. was relieved Monday after the wing commander, Col. Greg Guillot, "determined that (Thomaston) couldn't effectively perform his duties," said Delanie Stafford, a 55th Wing spokesman. Thomaston had been Guillot's principal enlisted adviser, responsible for the military readiness and well-being of more than 5,000 enlisted airmen at Offutt. Stafford described the decision as "sudden" but said he couldn't discuss details because of privacy laws.

On May 1, 1960, the Soviet Union shot down a CIA U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. It was an international crisis for America’s intelligence agencies. A planned summit between Pres. Dwight Eisenhower and Premier Nikita Khrushchev was scuttled, much to Eisenhower’s embarrassment and to the fury of the Pakistanis, from whose territory the flight had been launched. First flown in 1957, the 63-foot-long, jet-powered U-2—capable of flying as high as 70,000 feet—is still used by the U.S. Air Force. But after the Powers incident, basing the plane in foreign countries became problematic. Their mere presence...

Russian aircraft manufacturer RSK-MiG seems to be quietly at work developing a new, lightweight fighter concept that could be a single-engine, lower-tier complement to the Sukhoi T-50/PAK-FA fighter currently in developmental flight testing. Discussions about this MiG project have been around for some time, but speculation about the programme's status was raised by an announcement at the end of December that the single, flying prototype of the MiG 1.44 fifth-generation Multirole Fighter (MFI) project will be put in "conservation storage at a hangar located at the Gromov Flight Research Institute [LII]", according to an official statement by MiG. Up to...

<p>An Air Force investigation into alleged drug use in the ranks has expanded to include 10 officers at six bases in the U.S. and Britain.</p> <p>Nine lieutenants and one captain are being investigated for illegal possession of recreational drugs, Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Brett Ashworth said Friday. The case began with the investigation of two officers at Edwards Air Force Base in California and quickly widened to several other bases because of the airmen's contacts with others about drug possession, he said.</p>

4 Believed Dead. God speed, airmen

Boston Globe must be excerped only(copyright)

After a 30-year military career in which he earned three graduate degrees, rose to the rank of colonel, and served as an aide to Pentagon brass, Robert Freniere can guess what people might say when they learn he's unemployed and lives out of his van: Why doesn't this guy get a job as a janitor? Freniere answers his own question: "Well, I've tried that."

What are we to make of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF)? Over the past several months, several pieces of good news about the program have emerged. The Royal Netherlands Air Force [3] just became the second partner organization to operate the F-35. While new reports note a deal is not finalized, a South Korean purchase of the plane [4] looks likely and with Japan [5] [6]already committed the plane looks set to soar in Asian skies. Indeed, while several partners have reduced their commitment over the last year, none have backed out fully. The F-35 Lightning II...

NORAD’s tradition of tracking Santa’s sleigh began with a wrong number. Right before Christmas in 1955, Sears ran an ad offering millions of toy-hungry girls and boys the chance to talk to the big man himself. In Colorado Springs, the retailer published the local phone number to the North Pole as ME 2-6681. Modal TriggerCol. Harry Shoup There was only one problem: The number was one digit off. And that wrong number rang on the desk of a high-ranking officer in a bunker at the Continental Air Defense Command — the predecessor of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which has...

Washington (AFP) - Long disliked by the US Air Force, the A-10 Thunderbolt II ground-attack jet may finally be heading for the chopping block due to budget constraints...

A very entertaining and inspirational 6 minutes. Just wish I'd been there. Lucky the atheists weren't there with their lawyers to stop the show.

When former Air Force Academy cadet Eric Thomas faced a disciplinary board in August 2012, a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations said he would come to explain how Thomas worked dozens of cases as a confidential informant and had been of great service to the Air Force. The agent never showed up, and Thomas was expelled from the academy eight months later. On Friday, an active-duty member of the Air Force Academy with direct knowledge of the case said the agent, Brandon Enos, did not show up because he was told not to by the...

The US Air Force has secretly developed a new stealth drone for long-range reconnaissance missions that could be operational by 2015, according to a report Friday in an industry magazine. The unmanned drone, dubbed RQ-180, is currently in the testing phase at the top secret Groom Lake air base in Nevada -- the infamous "Area 51" where the Air Force tested the U2 spy planes in the late 1950s, Aviation Week said. The Air Force refused to comment when contacted by AFP. The new aircraft was reportedly built by Northrop Grumann, the company behind the Global Hawk and the X-47B...

Until Lockheed Martin finally builds the SR-72 Mach-6 spy plane it announced in November, the iconic SR-71 Blackbird, capable of flying three times the speed of sound, remains the fastest warplane ever flown operationally. So fast that no missiles fired at it had a chance of hitting. When the U-2 spy plane was built in the 1950s, its designer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson already knew that it would be vulnerable to enemy defenses.

Why does Santa need a fighter escort? Children's groups outraged as NORAD militarises Christmas Eve tracker • NORAD officials say the inclusion of jet fighters is a nod to the true mission of the agency - which is to track and intercept airborne threats Outraged child advocates are blasting NORAD's new 3D Santa Tracker program because it includes a fighter jet escort for jolly old Saint Nick. Some say the new online portrait could give kids the wrong impression about Santa Claus - associating him with the military and violence. But Pentagon officials argue the North American Aerospace Defense Command...

"Ultimately, the ORS-3 is about enabling the warfighter to perform his or her mission efficiently and effectively," ORS-3 mission manager Jeff Welsh, of the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base, told reporters on Nov. 14. "We support that critical effort through rapid response and reduced-cost space operations."