Established in 1941, as the Air Corps Advanced Flying School in Columbus, Mississippi, Columbus Air Force Base has been training pilots since WWII and continues to effectively train pilots.
In fact, approximately half of all of the pilots in the United States Air Force were trained at Columbus AFB which is also the home of the world’s busiest military air traffic control facility.
In 1941, city officials in Biloxi created a formal offer to invite the US Army Corps to build a military base there in support of the buildup for World War II training.
It was initially named Army Air Corps Station No.8 and later designated as Keesler Army Airfield. The base is named in honor of 2nd Lt. Samuel Reeves Keesler Jr. who was a native of Greenwood, Mississippi that died of wounds while serving as an aerial observer in France during World War I.
Military bases in Mississippi include Keesler Air Force Base, Gulfport Battalion Center, NS Pascagoula, NAS Meridian, and Columbus AFB. The capital of Mississippi is Jackson which is centrally located in the state and has several nice shopping malls. The sales tax rate is 7 percent, the income tax varies from 3 to 5 percent and they rank next to last for education out of the fifty states.
The climate in Mississippi is considered to be mild with short winters, hot summers and an average rainfall of 56 inches a year. MS has a variety of industries which include fishing, farming, manufactured goods, mining, meat packing and gambling. Of course they are probably best known for their floating casinos which line up along the Mississippi River and gulf coast.
Mississippi has a large number of parks and wildlife areas that offer a variety of activities which include hunting, fishing, boating, swimming, hiking, camping, biking and geocaching. Geocaching is a new sport where people use a GPS device and input a set of coordinates in order to search for a hidden treasure known as a geocache.