Mission
The 146th AW's primary mission is to provide global military airlift capability to a full spectrum of state and federal agencies. Flying the Lockheed C-130J Super Hercules aircraft, the 146th has provided humanitarian relief in the aftermath of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and other disasters, in California, the United States and internationally.
The 146th is one of four C-130 ANG units whose contribution to the United States' aerial fire fighting capability includes equipment and techniques for efficient, effective suppression of large wildland fires from the air. Since 1974, using the Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System (MAFFS) units supplied by the US Forest Service and mounted in four C-130s, the wing’s aerial fire fighting crews have been credited with saving many lives and countless millions of dollars worth of structures, forests, and brush land in California and other states and countries.
MAFFS II was used for the first time on a fire in July 2010, using the latest generation Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules aircraft. The 146th Airlift Wing was the first to transition to the MAFFS 2 system in 2008, and it remains the only unit flying the new system on the C-130J aircraft.
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Famous quotes containing the word mission:
“Every Age has its own peculiar faith.... Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.”
—Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872)
“When you’re dealing with monkeys, you’ve got to expect some wrenches.”
—Alvah Bessie, Ranald MacDougall, and Lester Cole. Raoul Walsh. Captain Nelson, Objective Burma, giving a subaltern a mission (1945)
“We can come up with a working definition of life, which is what we did for the Viking mission to Mars. We said we could think in terms of a large molecule made up of carbon compounds that can replicate, or make copies of itself, and metabolize food and energy. So that’s the thought: macrocolecule, metabolism, replication.”
—Cyril Ponnamperuma (b. 1923)