Fightin’ 55th notes 20 years in Mideast - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Fightin’ 55th notes 20 years in Mideast

The 55th Wing has been patrolling the skies of the Middle East so long that the wing’s youngest airmen weren’t even born when the unit’s reconnaissance planes first deployed.

This month, an RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance plane from the unit based at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., flew a mission that marked 20 years of continuous deployment to the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility. Air Force officials said in a news release they think it is the longest such assignment in the service’s history.

The wing — known as the Fightin’ Fifty-Fifth — performs intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, command and control, combat support and information warfare missions. More than 7,300 airmen are assigned to the wing, which has a presence at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz.; RAF Mildenhall, England; Kadena Air Base, Japan, and Naval Support Activity Souda Bay, Crete.

The unit has 48 aircraft, including all 17 of the Air Force’s RC-135s. The 135-foot-long plane has a ceiling of 50,000 feet and carries a crew of up to 27.

Aircrews from the 55th were alerted to a deployment hours after the Iraqi military invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. Planes from the unit, then called the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, arrived at Riyadh Air Base, Saudi Arabia, on Aug. 9.

“I remember my boss saying, ‘We’re going to get in there, kick butt and be back home in a week,’” said former Staff Sgt. Ronald Schott, who served as a lead airborne maintenance technician on the first 55th Wing aircraft to arrive in the Middle East. “My response was, ‘We’ll get our foot in the door there and we’ll never leave.’” Schott now works as a civilian contractor at Offutt.

Since then, the unit has provided reconnaissance and surveillance for the missions that followed, including the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the patrolling of no-fly zones. The wing flew missions over Afghanistan after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and later provided ISR assets during the Iraq war.

Aircrews and maintainers average more than three deployments a year. Most are on a 60-days-on, 60-days-off cycle. Most of the wing’s deployers operate RC-135s for the 763rd Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, which provides intelligence collection across the area of operations.

And apparently the only thing as enduring as the wing’s deployment is its members’ optimism that their time overseas would soon end.

“In the years that I would go back over there, I was told so many times that we were going to leave there forever,” said former Staff Sgt. Tom Lewis, also a lead airborne maintenance technician in 1990 and now a contractor. “When we fought the last operation, they said that everyone will be home by Christmas — they just forgot to tell us what year.”