Air Force U S

For a service usually stationed so far from the front lines that it has earned the sobriquet "Chair Force," some of the scenes now unfolding at the Air Force's primary training base almost seem blasphemous. New recruits are being trained to use rifles. They are being taught hand-to-hand combat skills. They are being prepped as battlefield medics.

The Air Force is developing a new high-speed, high-altitude spy plane designed to elude enemy radar, defense industry sources said Sunday. The new stealth-type aircraft, a successor to the 25-year-old SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane, will be built by Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Group in Burbank, which also built the SR-71 and the F-19 stealth fighter, the sources said. Lockheed and Defense Department officials would not comment on the secret program.

The Titan 4 booster rocket that erupted in fire at Edwards Air Force Base on Friday while being assembled by crane is a key part of the Air Force's answer to the space shuttle--a powerful, unmanned rocket that can launch heavy payloads into space. But the $200-million-a-shot Titan, like its civilian counterpart, has had its problems.

The Air Force has grounded its entire fleet of F-15s, the service's premier fighter aircraft, after one of the planes disintegrated over eastern Missouri during a training mission, raising the possibility of a fatal flaw in the aging fighters' fuselage that could keep it out of the skies for months. Gen. T.

A U.S. Air Force pilot and a visiting British Royal Air Force flier died Wednesday morning at Edwards Air Force Base after apparently trying to bail out of their T-38 training jet following a mid-air collision with an F-16 fighter, Air Force officials said. The F-16, with damage to one wing, landed safely on a dry lake runway after the collision, which occurred just after 10 a.m. in clear fall skies. Both pilots aboard the F-16 were uninjured. Killed were Lt. Col. William R.

A U.S. Navy spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided Sunday over the South China Sea, causing the American craft to make an emergency landing in China and the Chinese plane to crash, U.S. and Chinese officials said. The 24 crew members aboard the EP-3 U.S. reconnaissance plane were unhurt, but U.S. defense officials said they have been unable to establish contact with the crew since the craft came to ground on Hainan island, a Chinese province off the country's southern coast.

"Arm the phasers" is a battle command that Pentagon officials believe will soon move out of the realm of science fiction. Under an ambitious $5-billion program that is supposed to revolutionize warfare much as gunpowder once did, some of the nation's top scientists are working on a high-energy chemical laser that would shoot lethal beams a few hundred miles to knock out enemy missiles.

An A-10 attack plane has crashed at a desert training range, killing one of just 14 women flying fighter jets for the Air Force. The plane went down in southwestern Arizona. Capt. Amy Lynn Svoboda was the Air Force's first female pilot to die in a crash, a Pentagon spokesman said. Svoboda, 29, of Glen Ellyn, Ill., was about two hours into a training flight, a base spokesman said.

A newly released Air Force report on the October, 1991, helicopter crash that killed three servicemen at Edwards Air Force Base gives no clear cause for the accident. The document, called an accident investigation report, contains the only findings on the crash that the Air Force intends to release. There is a separate safety mishap investigation report, which typically states a cause, but its findings are confidential.

More than half of the tools built by McDonnell Douglas for production of C-17 cargo jets were found to be faulty after Air Force officials ordered a special sample inspection last year, it was learned Thursday. Air Force officials ordered the inspection after they discovered that quality assurance records for the C-17 tools had been altered, according to an Air Force statement issued Thursday in response to an inquiry by The Times.