The US just sent four tankers to Europe. Take an inside look at how these old planes work—and how the tech underpinning the fleet is slowly evolving.
caught a ride on has been in the Air Force’s inventory for some 40 years. The KC-135, which makes up the majority of the Air Force’s fleet of more than 400 tankers, has an average age of about 60, according to a recentfrom the Government Accountability Office. “You just can’t keep [the KC-135] planes flying that much longer—they have reliability problems, they have maintenance challenges, they’re expensive to operate,” Harrison says.
“The KC-10 has been definitely a workhorse for the US Air Force,” Dewsnap said before takeoff that day, standing on the tarmac, arms crossed. “It’s sad to see it go to pasture.”The quirks of the decades-old KC-10 were on full display before it lifted off the ground from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey to fly south to meet the Raptors. The first problem was a fuel leak in one of the engines; the ground crew fixed it. The second problem occurred after the aircraft had already started taxiing.
Boeing concedes that the tech is now dated; the company received the contract over a decade ago. “We had basically 2010 technology that we had to build and produce [the aircraft with],” says Mike Hafer, Boeing’s business development senior manager on the KC-46 program. In 2020, Boeing and the Air Forcethat the airplane maker would put in a new vision system. Specifically, the RVS includes two regular-vision cameras, plus two infrared ones to employ during nighttime refueling.
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