A Look Back at Operational Testing in the U.S. Air Force

摘要

For more than three decades, the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center has been the U.S. Air Force's focal point for operational test and evaluation (OT&E). Before its establishment, however, the Air Force and its predecessors in the U.S. Army tried various ways to do (or not to do) OT&E. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, the other Allied powers were so far ahead in all aspects of military aviation that the eager airmen of the American Expeditionary Force flew almost exclusively in British and French airplanes. Not only had the Europeans developed new technologies and manufacturing techniques during the previous three years of war, they also had been operationally testing several generations of increasingly capable flying machines in the deadly skies over the Western Front.