The 355th Fighter Squadron 'Fighting Falcons', Alaska Air National Guard, deployed to Bagram (Afghanistan) in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2005. The unit was at that time based at Eielson (AK). The squadron was inactivated in August 2007. After an other reactivation in October 2015 and and inactivation on October 2019 (flying F-16s from Forth Worth) the squadron was reactivated again, this time with F-35As at (again) Eielson on 18 December 2020.

Tanker 979 was based on a 747-100 originally manufactured by Boeing in 1971 for Delta Air Lines. It entered service for the first time in 2009, fighting a fire in Cuenca, Spain, and made its first American operation on August 31, 2009 at the Oak Glen Fire in California. When Evergreen went bankrupt in 2013 it was sitting at Marana to be scrapped in 2017, only after several key components were removed and installed in N744ST