Panther of the Week: Senior Airman William

  • Published
  • 460th Space Wing Public Affairs
Name:  Senior Airman William 

Unit/Job title:  2nd Space Warning Squadron, Overhead Persistent Infra-Red Battlespace
Awareness Center crew chief

Length of Service:  3 years, 5 months

Hometown:  Granite Falls, North Carolina

Hobbies:  Reading, spending time with family, hiking, and outdoor activities

Unique fact:   Scared of the dark

Senior Airman William joined the Air Force straight out of high school at 18 years old. He has been married to his wife, Alexis, since 2014. They just had a baby boy, Landon, who is now four months old.

Senior Airman William was certified as one of six first-ever crew chiefs for the new Overhead Persistent Infra-Red Battlespace Awareness Center.  On Jan. 6, Gonzales was the first crew chief so successfully begin 24/7 messaging on the Common Interactive Broadcast network, providing near real-time, tactically relevant OPIR to warfighters across the globe.  He transmitted the first OPIR report just a few minutes after going live. 

Over the last two months, Senior Airman William helped build the tactics, techniques, procedures, job aids and Standard Operating Procedures for this new mission center and paved the way for the activation of the 11th Space Experimentation Squadron here at Buckley this coming year.  He is a key member of the team that successfully demonstrated "concept of operations" via U.S. Strategic Command's Global Thunder Exercise and ultimately gained all required approvals from USSTRATCOM and Air Force Space Command authorities to fully employ the remarkable on-orbit sensors and utilize the OPIR data produced by them to support the warfighter.

- Capt. Jose, 2nd Space Warning Squadron flight commander