5001st Composite Wing
military unit
The 5001st Composite Wing is a defunct United States Air Force organization. Throughout its existence, it was assigned to the Alaskan Air Command and stationed at Ladd Air Force Base, Alaska.
It was established as the Yukon Composite Wing on 15 June 1948, and then redesignated as the 5001st Composite Wing on 20 September 1948. It was inactivated on 1 October 1957 when the four digit unit designations on Ladd got changed to 5060th.
Components
5001st Composite Group
5001st Air Defense Group
5001st Supply Squadron
18th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, 20 September 1954 – 1 October 1955
433d Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, 20 September 1954 – 1 October 1955
449th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, 1 May-8 April 1953; 20 September 1954 – 1 October 1955
5th Liaison Squadron, 13 April 1953 – 10 May 1945 (Attached)(11th AD)
720th Fighter-Bomber Squadron, 25 December 1953 – 17 May 1954 (11th AD)
46th Reconnaissance Squadron, 1 June 1946
Redesigned: 72d Reconnaissance Squadron, 25 October 1947 – 28 June 1949
Operations
Activated at Ladd AFB in 1948 as the host unit for a diverse mission. The wing routinely hosted attached aircraft and personnel from CONUS bases in large-scale winter exercises, while at the same time guarding against the Cold War threat of Soviet aggression. Attached units carried out a wide variety of missions, including
Strategic Aerial Reconnaissance
Air Defense
Search and Rescue
Arctic Research
The 5001st also hosted Army personnel deployed to the Fairbanks area. The wing was inactivated in 1961 when Ladd AFB turned over to the United States Army.
Strategic Aerial Reconnaissance
In the early years of the Cold War, some of the most important strategic reconnaissance was carried out by Strategic Air Command units deployed to Ladd AFB. One of the SAC's initial missions was to plan strategic aerial reconnaissance on a global scale. The first efforts were in photo reconnaissance and mapping.
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This entry incorporates text from “5001st Composite Wing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.