[John_C_Miller]

I’ll start this forum up.

While it’s tough to choose an absolute favorite, one that consistently rises to the top and always impresses me anytime I see one is the SR-71 Blackbird.

The engineering behind it is probably my favorite thing. It’s mind-blowing, especially when you consider it was almost all done with pencil, paper, and slide-rules. And all that engineering was for a specific purpose: to produce an aircraft that could fly higher and/or faster than anything shot at it. And it did just that.

One of the things that makes it even more dear to my heart though is that they were based out of Kadena Air Base in Okinawa for a while, which is where my brother-in-law was first stationed after getting selected to fly KC-135’s.

One of my favorite stories about the Blackbird though is that technically it should have been called the RS-71. When it was first unveiled, however, the President introduced it as the SR-71 Blackbird, so the Air Force just went along with it. I haven’t verified that, but I like the story.

[John_C_Miller]

I completely understand how frustrating it is trying to schedule an AFOQT and TBAS, especially as a civilian. While calling/emailing AFROTC detachments is a solid place to start, I finally had a breakthrough by calling the Testing Offices at local Air Force Bases.

I had to call multiple times and leave multiple messages. I never got any calls back, but a lady in the office finally picked up the phone when I called one time and got me scheduled. I recently got my TBAS scheduled through the same lady once I had her email address.

Don’t be afraid to look at a base several hours away. My testing center was about 2 hours away, but I was willing to drive over 4 hours to a different site if that’s what it took. The websites for the different bases should have a directory somewhere on the page that will give you the phone numbers to the different offices in the installation.

Also, see if you can follow this link. As far as I can tell it’s just a bunch of testing locations for various Air Force tests; either AFOQT, TBAS, or others.

https://access.afpc.af.mil/pcsmdmz/Testing%20Locations.pdf

Best of luck!