The 20-year, one month and four-day long career of U.S. Air Force Master Sergeant Alexander Davis came to an end Thursday afternoon during a retirement ceremony held inside the Air Delivery complex at U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground’s (YPG).
“You were the perfect person for this job. You knocked it out of the park,” said Lt. Col. Dylan Bell, commander of the Air Mobility Command Test and Evaluation Squadron (AMCTES), which is from Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, in N.J. “Not a single moment over the past two years that I have been in this squadron have I ever had to worry about what is going on here in Yuma. I got nothing but good reports.”
In addition to having admirably served as the Airborne Test Force’s (ATF) liaison with the Air Force the past two years, Davis had operated on his own as a sole detachment at YPG as a MC-130H Instructor Loadmaster.
In presiding over the ceremony, Bell also noted the “absolute amount of experience” Davis had brought to the job and called him a consummate professional.
“The Air Force is going to miss you,” Bell said. “I can’t thank you enough for the job you have done out here. Congratulations on a career well done.”
Davis led the first platform-delivered unmanned aerial system initiative, using his expertise to develop a system that enables swarm delivery of battlefield effects for the Joint Force.
Furthermore, Davis improved airdrops across the entire aircraft fleet, developed new heavy air drop methods that worked for all platforms, came up with a safer towed jumper checklist, and rewrote the joint precision airdrop checklist for the C-130.
Finally, he led over 33 weeks of active testing for the Joint Force, NASA, and coalition partners, which earned him the command’s Test and Evaluation Directorate Senior Non-Commissioned Officer of the Quarter.
In his closing remarks Davis said YPG had been an incredible place to have been stationed and praised all the ATF soldiers he had worked alongside of, saying that they all had been, “extraordinarily qualified at what they do.”
“Just know that you are the best at what you do. You find all the stuff first and get it fixed before it goes out to the guys on the line,” he told them. “That is a huge amount of trust. You forget because you do it every day. You forget you are important.”
He ended by saying that he felt that he had an impactful career and that it was also one in which he could be extremely proud.
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