Case Study: Air Force Air Education and Training Command (AETC) achieves secure, command-wide emergency alerting to 57,000 personnel in under one minute with BlackBerry AtHoc

Network-Centric Emergency Warning System for Command Intallations

The U.S. Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command (AETC), which oversees 13 bases and roughly 57,000 military and civilian personnel, needed a reliable, secure way to deliver time‑critical threat notifications (from FPCON and anti‑terror warnings to severe weather) to everyone—indoors or outdoors—within one minute. The solution also had to interoperate with existing telephony and PA systems, allow alert activation from any workstation if a command post was down, and meet DoD/AF security and FSTR (AFI 10‑2501) requirements.

AETC selected AtHoc’s networked COTS alerting software, which sends audio‑visual pop‑up alerts to networked devices in about one minute and can trigger sirens and telephony with a single push. Deployed in hours and fully operational within days at multiple bases, the DITSCAP‑certified system centralized alert management, enabled pre‑programmed, targeted notifications, met Air Force notification standards, and significantly improved installation‑wide emergency response readiness.

Air Force Air Education and Training Command (AETC)