349th Aeromedical Staging Squadron Airman is 455th Air Expeditionary Wing Warrior of the Week

  • Published
  • By 455th Air Expeditionary Wing
  • AEF
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  Senior Airman Danielle Acosta is this week's 455th Air Expeditionary Wing Warrior of the Week. She is an aerospace medicine technician deployed from the 349th Aeromedical Staging Squadron and is a Tracy, Calif. native.

Airman Acosta works for the Contingency Aeromedical Staging Facility located at the Craig Joint Theater Hospital. She provides support and continuity of medical care for patient movement. Airman Acosta also provides patient reception and treatment while they are at the CASF. She also directs mission launch and recovery of patients to and from a variety of coalition aircraft.

Airman Acosta was surprised she had even been nominated for the wing honor. "We do our job to do it not for the recognition."

She also explained the importance of her job saying, if it was not for the work completed by her and her team members at the CASF, critically wounded patients may have a more difficult time getting to life saving medical care. Her supervision highlighted some of her accomplishments here by saying, Airman Acosta has performed exemplary as the Mission NCO ("Bulldog") for Aeromedical Evacuation (AE) missions for the Contingency Aeromedical Staging Facility. Her facility serves as the hub for all patient movement within the entire Afghanistan AOR and evacuation to locations outside of the theater of operations.

This week, she spearheaded the team that launched and recovered 17th AE missions (3 ISAF missions), involving 117 patients to include 19 critically injured and this rotation's first ever K-9 "working-dog" patient. She was chosen to be the distinguished visitor briefer for the CASF briefing two distinguished visitor tours, including the new 455th AEW Commander. She is highly self motivated; she took it upon herself to reorganize the CASF's storage container to capitalize on the storage space available for over 7,000 pounds of patient baggage, medical supplies and donated items to make room for additional items to support the surge. Her "can-do/will-do" attitude has been a force multiplier in the successful movement of over 2200 patients since January 2010 which is a 250 percent increase from the same time period in 2009.