In light of Air Mobility Command’s outstanding work during the evacuation of Kabul, Scott Cuong Tran and Nick Tran visited its busiest hub, Travis AFB in California, to find out how the US provides effective global transport.
Northeast of San Francisco, the town of Fairfield hosts Travis Air Force Base (AFB), home base of the 60th and 349th Air Mobility Wings Travis was initially built as an Army airfield in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and was originally named the Fairfield-Suisun Army Air Base (AAB). Activated in May 1943, to protect the west coast from a Japanese invasion, it hosted medium bombers of the 4th Air Force such as the A-20 Havoc, A-26 Invader, B-25 Mitchell and B-26 Marauder. Its strategic location as a transfer point to the Pacific was quickly noticed and it was assigned to the Army Air Corps Air Transport Command.
By the end of the war, Fairfield-Suisun AAB had established itself as the gateway to the Pacific for air transportation. In 1949, Strategic Air Command (SAC) took control of the base and began flying the B-29 Superfortress, B-36 Peacemaker and B-52 Stratofortress of the 14th Air Division as part of its long-range bombing and reconnaissance tasks.
In August 1950, a B-29 carr…
