Captain Jeff Taliaferro, a 10-year Air Force veteran, flew a B-1B bomber over Iraq as we attacked Saddam's war machine.
In a presentation at the Black Hat and Defcon security conference in July, for instance, French security researcher Andre Costin presented vulnerabilities in the next-generation air traffic control system known as ADS-B that he said would allow a hacker with a software-defined radio to track and even spoof planes in the sky, potentially creating dangerous distractions for pilots.
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Fischer-Tropsch derived fuels for aviation have been produced recently for the Department of Defense by U.S. based Syntroleum, and have been successfully tested by the US Air Force in a B-52 jet with all eight of its engines fueled by the mixture.
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Then came Kelly Flinn, the Air Force's first B-52 female pilot, and, a few months later, William Kite.
Pinned down by the onslaught, King said the troops called in "close air support" from a B-52 bomber on regular patrol over Afghanistan, which dropped seven large bombs, ending the confrontation.
Since its debut in the 1999 air war over Kosovo, the B-2 has flown combat missions exclusively from Whiteman, logging sorties that have at times exceeded 40 hours.
ADS-B promises to make air traffic control easier, cheaper and in many ways safer by allowing planes to transmit their locations by radio frequency instead of depending on towers to use radar to track and coordinate them.
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Flinn, a 1993 Air Force Academy graduate, became a B-52 bomber pilot in 1995 as the service began allowing women to fly warplanes.
Additionally, the Air-Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) and the Advanced Cruise Missile (ACM) are launched from B-52s.
She is now one of only a few women in the Air Force qualified to fly bombers such as the B-52 and the swing-wing B-1.
The U.S. heavy bomber fleet consisted of fewer than 400 B-52s, none of which carried air-launched cruise missiles.
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The Air Force is actually quite happy with the progress of the B-2 program.
When B-1Bs went into action in Kosovo, air force commanders could see Serbian SA-6 surface-to-air missile radars track the planes.
Despite the passage of 60 years since its inception, the B-52 remains the most common heavy bomber in the Air Force fleet.
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An example is the Minot incident, where six live nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 and flown from North Dakota down to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
The B-2 typically is the first bomber used in every air campaign because it is so survivable, and with recent modifications it will soon be able to precisely hit 200 targets in a single flight.
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Once he set the sight, the Norden took over the controls of the plane--and for the next few minutes it held in its gears and gyroscopes the lives of the crew of the Badlands Bat, a B-17G in the 401st bomb group of the 8th Air Force.
This point was repeatedly made in response to criticisms that the Air Force and the Defense Department had not worked out a strategy for funding the B-2 in an era of diminishing defense spending.
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In fact, the Air Force has already begun testing a program to certify coal-based synthetic fuels for the B-52 bomber, a process that may lead to synthetic fuel use in all of its planes.
Even with ADS-B, jets will be restricted to narrow lanes to reduce the complexity of air traffic control.
The Air Force confirmed arrangements have been reached in the sensitive case involving the division's first female B-52 pilot.
The 95 B-52's are all over thirty years old, and their ability to penetrate modern air defenses is very doubtful.
Aircraft equipped with ADS-B are able to automatically send highly precise data, such as aircraft positioning and speed, to air traffic controllers every second.
"We compete in the land of the giants, " says Jones, 56, a onetime fighter pilot for the Air Force who later spent 15 years coaxing Congress and the Pentagon to fund big-ticket Rockwell International programs like the B-1 bomber.
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