Airmen of the 31st Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, 510th Aircraft Maintenance Unit “Buzzards” recently made an appearance at Cerklje Air Base, Slovenia, testing their ability to rapidly deploy crews and equipment to a remote location and keep our jets in the air.
Transcript
So we’re here at Cerklje Airbase to exercise our ability to use different fields throughout Europe. So we’ve brought our F-16’s to work with the PC-9’s and our partners here at Slovenia. So this is kind of a new concept for us. It gives us the ability to move throughout Europe and use different airfields that we’re not used to and just be a lot more adaptive to the things that can come our way. So this is a big training for readiness. This isn’t something we do very often. We don’t have the comfort of our home like we normally do. We’re bringing jets here and trying to turn them see how fast we can do that and with minimal equipment that’s out there which really helps us be ready for the next fight. It’s a small footprint of American forces out here. It’s minimal on aircraft, minimal amount on people, minimal amount of tools. It shows that we can support our allies in any aspect for any mission that they need help with. Going in different countries you don’t meet too many people that know English very well. Getting to a new location where you’ve never been at where they’ve never seen the aircraft or your people kind of getting all that settled in and organized together with our counterparts is probably the most difficult part.
[Guest] It is important. Keeps our pilots spun up on their training as well as the maintainers. They get to see a different country give their perspective how they maintain their aircraft and we learn from them as well as the same time we get our own training that’s keeping our aircraft up in the sky at all times and keeping the mission going forward.