A Company 2916th Aviation Battalion Desert Hawks Patch Hook Backing

A Company, 2916th Aviation Battalion is the Desert Hawks, the Black Hawk company that flies the Army's senior leaders out into the box at the National Training Center. The 2916th is Fort Irwin's own aviation battalion, part of the 916th Support Brigade, and its job is keeping the air side of every NTC rotation running over the Mojave Desert. Brigades rotate through Fort Irwin to fight a full-time opposing force in open desert, and the commanders and visiting leaders watching that fight need a ride out to it. VIP transport is Alpha's main task, flown several times a month. Inside a battalion that calls itself the Raptors, Alpha is the hawk.

Alpha flies the UH-60L Black Hawk out of Barstow-Daggett Airport, seven of them as of 2025, after running a mix of UH-72A Lakotas and UH-60s from 2011 to 2015. Besides the VIP runs, its crews fly air assault, resupply, reconnaissance and casualty evacuation missions for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse opposing force. Alpha's Black Hawks carry no MILES laser gear, so a Bravo Company UH-72A flies along on exercises. Bravo flies as Sokol, Russian for falcon, playing the enemy air threat, and in the Huey years Sokol crews flew UH-1s painted to look like Mi-24 Hinds. Charlie Company is Desert Dustoff, MEDEVAC on call around the clock for the post and San Bernardino County, and B Company, 229th Aviation Regiment, the Flying Tigers, flies the MQ-1C Gray Eagle.

This is a 3 by 2 inch rectangle with a brown merrowed border around a desert tan field, the same tan as the ground Alpha flies over every day. Across the top a hawk spreads its wings the full width of the patch, and the bird is built from the flag: blue wings scattered with white stars, a body and tail feathers in red and white stripes. Below it, Desert Hawks is stitched in black script with a red outline, and A Co 2916th AVN BN runs underneath in red block letters. The colors are muted enough to sit right on tan or coyote gear. The back is hook backing only, the hook side alone with no loop piece, ready to press onto any loop panel.

Nobody rotates to NTC to see the 2916th, but every brigade that trains there leans on it. The Desert Hawks put commanders where they can watch their units fight, and Desert Dustoff crews are the first call when someone gets hurt in the box. Charlie's reach runs past the training area into the civilian communities of San Bernardino County, and in October 2021 a Desert Dustoff crew rescued the pilot of a Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet that went down in Death Valley National Park. This is support aviation in the plainest sense, flown year round in the heat and dust that rotational units live in for a few weeks at a time. The soldiers who crewed, maintained and flew Alpha's Black Hawks did that work every day of the year.

Press it onto the loop panel of a plate carrier, flight bag or range bag, or set it in a shadow box beside the Desert Hawks 4 Stars patch and a photo from the flight line at Barstow-Daggett. It also makes a good gift for a crew chief or pilot who flew VIPs out of Fort Irwin. Hook side only, so it goes on and comes off as often as the job changes.