National Meeting 2022 Salt Lake City, Utah

The National Meeting in Salt Lake City this year was excellent. Attending the AAFM National Meetings are incredible for a variety of reasons, namely being around a number of down to earth awesome people, experiencing some excellent tours, and taking in sights around the city that add to a great experience.

On Thursday we visited Hill Air Force Base for the Minuteman tour. Our first stop was an excellent briefing in the Falcon Hill building (pictured below), where we learned a lot about Hill AFB and how it operates. Following our briefing we had the opportunity to tour a depot maintenance facility. Our tour guide at the maintenance facility was excellent, and showed us a number of Minuteman payload transporters they were working on. From there, we were treated to lunch at the Hill AFB Museum for a ribbon cutting ceremony regarding the new ICBM exhibit the museum has created.

There is nothing like sitting there hearing the various speakers during this ceremony, all the while a number of different jets were taking off nearby, adding to the ambiance that you are in fact, on a very busy Air Force base.

On Friday we headed back to Hill AFB for a Sentinel missile themed tour, which proved to be outstanding. For this tour we visited the Northrop Grumman campus located at Hill AFB, and again were given an excellent briefing on the status of the Sentinel missile.

Following the briefing we got to tour the "mock up" building at Northrop Grumman, where we were shown a variety of components in their various stages of development that will be incorporated into the Sentinal missile program. The Northrop Grumman engineers that were a part of this tour were outstanding, and it is obvious they are very passionate on what they are working on. The technology they are developing to be incorporated into being used with the Sentinel missile program was mind blowing. The Sentinel missile and its components are a huge shift/leap forward, compared to the Minuteman missile.

The final leg of our Sentinel missile themed tour provided us the opportunity to visit the Northrop Grumman winding plant where they are producing the 1st and 2nd stage boosters for the Sentinel missile.

Words cannot describe what it was like standing there watching two boosters in their various stages of production, that will be become a part of a Sentinel missile. Photos of the boosters are below.

Some photos of the sites around the Marriott Hotel are included, as well as a personal visit to Willard, Utah, for some incredible fruit stands to purchase some delicious locally grown peaches, apples, tomatoes and even some very hot jalapeno peppers.

Lastly, a few photos of our general AAFM members meeting, photos honoring David Stumpf for the outstanding Minuteman missile book that he wrote, and our final gathering for the week, the banquet which was held Saturday night.

This author highly recommends attending a National Meeting hosted by AAFM. You are surrounded by some incredible sites to take in, from the Air Force based tours, the sites around the town the meeting is being hosted in, and being around some awesome, down to earth, great people.