314th AW Rodeo 2011 team named Best Air Mobility Wing, Airdrop Wing

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  • 19th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
LITTLE ROCK AIR FORCE BASE, Ark. --  Air Mobility RODEO 2011 team members from the 314th Airlift Wing gathered on the base flightline Monday after hearing some surprising post-award ceremony news: the wing earned the Best Air Mobility Wing and Best Airdrop Wing trophies.

A programming error in the AMC RODEO 2011 scoring system resulted in a change to several major awards, including the Best Air Mobility Wing.

After hearing the news about the scoring programming error, 314th AW RODEO team members received another surprise: the new trophies would be presented by Maj. Gen. Frederick H. Martin, Director of Operations, Headquarters, AMC, and RODEO commander.

"It's an honor for me to be here," Martin said during an award ceremony Aug. 29, 2011, at Little Rock Air Force Base, Ark. "This award is part of what you've done. There is no finer balance between operations and maintenance than what you have here at the Rock."

Col. Mark Czelusta, 314th AW commander, credited the RODEO success to the strong partnerships enjoyed by his wing.

"We have an incredible partnership with the 19th Airlift Wing and the local community," said Czelusta. "The community is such a big part of this trophy and we couldn't have accomplished all this without them."

AMC officials found the programming error Aug. 18 during a thorough scrub of all the results prior to posting the detailed scores for RODEO competitors to access.

"There is an automated process in the scoring algorithm which improperly assigned a median score for an event," said Martin in a news release. "This program error was not found in testing. All manual scoring processes were triple checked; however, there was not a final check for one critical portion of the automated scoring process."

The error was isolated to the C-17 and C-130 Container Delivery System airdrop scores. No international team awards were affected.

The corrected results are as follows:

- Best Air Mobility Wing (Moore Trophy) was awarded to the 314th AW. It was incorrectly awarded to the 97th Air Mobility Wing, Altus Air Force Base, Okla.

- Best Airdrop Wing was also awarded to the 314th AW. It was incorrectly awarded to the 97th AMW. The 97th AMW actually finished in third place.

- Best C-130 Airdrop Aircrew was incorrectly awarded to the 314th AW (C-130E). The 314th AW actually finished in second place. This trophy was awarded to the 19th Airlift Wing (AMC) which incorrectly finished in second place.

Maintainers and flyers from the 314th AW RODEO team previously lassoed up the Maintenance Skills Competition Award - C-130 maintenance and the Maintenance Skills Competition Award - overall winner. The C-130E team snagged the Best Overall Maintenance Team award, Best Team Overall (Maintenance and Operations), Best Overall Aircrew Team and Best Overall Airdrop Score.

"This is a very unfortunate programming mistake," Martin said in a news release. "I will tell you that all of the competitors at RODEO were outstanding. The scoring was very close, and it was obvious that the best-of-the-best were competing. This scoring error should in no way detract from the incredible efforts our mobility forces put forward every day to ensure mission accomplishment."

General Martin said actions have been taken to prevent this type of issue from happening in 2013.

Air Mobility RODEO, sponsored by AMC, is an international Mobility Air Force's readiness competition focusing on improving worldwide air mobility wartime core abilities. RODEO 2011 was held at Joint Base Lewis-McChord from July 24-29.

From an international perspective, seven countries competed at RODEO 2011. Representatives from more than 20 other countries were on hand to observe. " RODEO provides a very unique forum for our Airmen and international partners to interact and share the best tactics, techniques and procedures for the mobility mission," Martin said.

(Air Mobility Command Public Affairs contributed to this report)