For years Air America was the CIA's clandestine airline in South East Asia, flying routinely into Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to ferry CIA personnel in and out of the region, and to resupply the agency's paramilitary operations against communism.
The American pilots, air crew, and ground crew who worked this covert program have been denied credit for federal service as counting towards their pensions and retirement. Air America employees were, on publicly available paperwork at the time, working for a private entity and this resulted in them not being eligible for government benefits.
A new bill introduced by Congressman Glenn Grothman, with bipartisan support, aims to fix this long-running oversight. It's called the Air America Act.
"Air America employees have not been granted their retirement credit because of an Office of Personnel Management (OPM) rule change in 1985 that required government form SF-50/52 to prove federal employment status," a press release from Grothman's office reads.
"While these patriots were, during their tenure working for Air America, legally defined as federal employees eligible for civil service retirement credit, the covert nature of their work resulted in a narrative that they were employees of a private entity. Moreover, for obvious reasons of secrecy in a clandestine operation, our government did not hire Air Americans using standard government forms. The unusual and unjust retroactive application of the amended regulation requiring form SF-50/52 in 1985 should never have been applied to Air Americans whose employing U.S. government entity, Air America, was dissolved in 1976," the release states.
Additionally, the bill also aims to address another oversight. Air America pilots and crew who were killed during the Vietnam conflict have never been properly recognized for their sacrifice. Unlike other CIA employees, they did not receive stars on the CIA's wall of honor memorial. The Air America Act aims to have five such deceased Air America employees recognized with stars.