Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee, Massachusetts, has been chosen as the lead reserve C-5 wing by the Air Force.
Westover's crews will be flying additional missions in the coming months.
More than a 140 Westover reservists will support five new flying missions of the giant C-5 cargo planes on an ongoing basis.
They will be joined in Chicopee by about 25 reservists from Dover Air Base in Delaware.
Rodney Furr, who is the chief of public affairs at Westover, said the base is picking up the workload of C-17 aircraft so they can be tasked for other support with other events going on in the world.
"The C-17 has a capability to fly into an unimproved runway whereas the C-5, even though it can fly further and carry more cargo, cannot land or take off on an unimproved runway," he said.
Furr says the crews could fly both domestically and internationally.
The call-up and missions are scheduled for 90 days but Furr says both could be extended beyond that.
