4,500th F-16 Delivery
3 April 2012
The 4,500th F-16 Fighting Falcon built worldwide was delivered in ceremonies 3 April 2012 at Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas. Employees, customers, program officials, and national, state, and local elected officials attended. The milestone aircraft was an Advanced Block 52 F-16 for the Royal Moroccan Air Force.
Beyond Kingfish
10 March 2012
Convair abruptly halted efforts on its losing Kingfish design when the CIA selected the Lockheed A-12 in August 1959 as a high-speed, high-altitude replacement for the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. The CIA officially terminated Convair’s work on Project Gusto—the project code name for the Dragon Lady replacement—in February 1960. The company received a final payment for work related to the program in January 1963.However, only ten months later, Convair used the predecessor to Kingfish — FISH — as the starting point for design studies for an A-12 replacement.
F-35 Flight Test Update 7
8 March 2012
Through 3 March 2012, the F-35 test program had completed 161 flights totaling more than 250 flight hours and had accrued more than 1,100 test points. F-35B test pilots have executed twenty-three vertical landings so far this year. With several more checkout flights completed, thirty-three pilots have now flown the F-35. Twenty-six pilots are flying currently.
Tweak My Ride
7 March 2012
A few straightforward exterior tweaks will make larger military aircraft markedly better. Using mostly company research and development dollars, researchers found that what will be the most practical answer—an elusive intersection of cost, difficulty to engineer, improvement in aircraft efficiency, and length of time for payback on investment—ended up being slightly different for the C-130, the C-5, and the P-3.
F-22 Milestones - Part 1
24 February 2012
This first half of a two-part F-22 chronology covers the major program events from those first studies to that first flight in 1997.
149th FW Trains F-16 Pilots
23 February 2012
The 149th Fighter Wing, the Texas Air National Guard unit located at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, trains both active duty and Air National Guard F-16 pilots in a variety of courses, from a basic course for new F-16 pilots recently graduated from undergraduate pilot training to a requalification course for experienced pilots.
Poland F-16 Operations
7 February 2012
The Block 52+ F-16 was chosen by Poland in 2002 after an exhaustive competition that involved several other fourth-generation fighters. The contract, signed in April 2003, included forty-eight F-16s, spare engines, missiles, precision-guided munitions, pilot and maintenance technician training, and a multibillion-dollar offset program.
C-5 Galaxy Videos
18 January 2012
Collection of videos of the C-5 Galaxy and C-5M Super Galaxy
T-50 Photos
6 January 2012
Ten years after the first T-50 rolled out of the Korean Aerospace Industries factory in Sacheon, South Korea, the program has radically improved the way fighter pilots are trained in Korea. Two training squadrons at Gwangju AB operate fifty aircraft and graduate about 140 students per year. The aircraft is also flown by the Black Eagles, the official aerobatic team of the ROKAF.
