JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii -- Within 75 minutes, Total Force Airmen from the 15th and 154th Aircraft Maintenance Squadrons loaded 347 Army soldiers onto an aircraft returning to Hawaii from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam.
Soldiers participated in Exercise Pacific Forager ‘21, a U.S. Army Pacific exercise designed to test and refine the Army’s ability to flow land power forces into the theater effectively with allies.
Soldiers from the 1st Corps, the Ohio Army National Guard, and Schofield Barracks were completing their 45-day training.
“We were on the ramp [Andersen] packing our deployment kits and providing maintenance to several aircraft and prepping them to return to home station when we were approached by Army leadership asking for support,” said 1st Lieutenant Seth Ollis, 15th AMXS assistant C-17 maintenance officer in charge.
Making a 10-mile round trip, the Airmen gathered their equipment to weigh, and load more than 15,000 lbs onto the civilian aircraft.
The total force Hawaiian Raptor Maintenance team managed to accomplish their urgent request with minutes to spare before takeoff and had the soldiers heading home after a 45-day training mission.
“I was thoroughly impressed at how quickly our team improvised with such a non-standard situation to ensure our Army teammates caught their flight on time,” said Ollis. “The team exemplified the CSAF’s accelerate change or lose framework in this situation by utilizing our knowledge, skills, and abilities from across five different Air Force specialties to make sure that the several Army units were out of the door on time.”