FEATURE ARTICLE // 36TH FIGHTER SQUADRON
The storied 36th Fighter Squadron ‘Fiends’ has been celebrating its centenary over the past year. Combat Aircraft takes a closer look at this famous unit.
ASK ANY AVIATION photographer about their ‘bucket list’ and you can almost guarantee that flying in Alaska is on it. The 49th state is a place that changes you once you’ve been there. It’s both enormous and wild — the rugged peaks of the Alaska Range, deep glacial valleys, and open plains of arctic tundra that cover thousands of square miles challenge one’s perspective of what ‘vast’ truly means. Not only that, but Alaska has more than 2.4 million square miles of airspace and nearly 750 recorded landing areas.
Heading to Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks is an opportunity you jump at, and the scope of this trip was something very special. The 36th Fighter Squadron (FS) ‘Fiends’ was in town, visiting from Osan Air Base in the Republic of Korea, for Exercise ‘Distant Thunder’. It came as the unit marked 100 years of service.
While there were many big Stateside celebrations for US Air Force fighter squadrons whose lineage dates back to WW1, that of the 36th went largely unnoticed due to its forward-based stat…
