Fighting Falcon Birthdays

The thirtieth anniversary of the first flight of the F-16 prototype was celebrated on 2 February. Company pilot Phil Oestricher completed the first official flight of the YF-16 on 2 February 1974 from Edwards AFB, California. Oestricher had also inadvertently flown the revolutionary aircraft two weeks earlier — Flight 0 — when he elected to take the aircraft airborne after experiencing control anomalies during a high-speed taxi test. The US Air Force celebrated twenty-five years of F-16 operations at Hill AFB, Utah, in January. The first F-16s assigned to an operational unit, the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing, arrived in January 1979. The wing was the first training unit and the first wing to become operational with the new fighter.