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dumb tanker question


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Just flipping through the Desert Storm Airpower book and saw a british tanker and it got me thinking, why do tankers have refueling probes anyways? Is it for long ferry flights or something? Seems they'd have enough to get where they were going or would just land and gas back up.

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Tankers DO have enough gas to get where they're going, but they don't always have enough to get there, AND offload some to other planes. IIRC, the KC-135 could deploy to an overseas base OR refuel planes, but not both at the same time. The KC-10, (and other tankers with the ability to BE refueled) can do both. SO, they could tank other planes on the flight to Saudi Arabia, for example.

I'd still love to see a daisy-chan of 3 or 4 KC-10's connected by thier refueling equipment.

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Just flipping through the Desert Storm Airpower book and saw a british tanker and it got me thinking, why do tankers have refueling probes anyways? Is it for long ferry flights or something? Seems they'd have enough to get where they were going or would just land and gas back up.

A lot of the British tankers (Tristars and VC10s) have a dual tanker transport role which may explain the probe, I've also got some pictures of a VC10 being refuelled from a Tristar during an exercise: the VC10 is fitted with wing pods, apparently it remained on station to support the exercising fast jets whilst being "topped up" by the Tristar which only had a centreline refuelling point.

The RAF's previous generation of tankers: Victor, Vulcan and Valiant were originally bombers so retained the refuelling probe from their previous role (not sure about the Valiant). During the Falklands War the Victors made great use of their in flight refuelling capability to accompany the Vulcan all the way to the South Altlantic and back.

HTH

Richard

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Another often overlooked advantage of gas passers having probes is the added flexibility of the following scenario: If you have a tanker cell of say 3-4 tankers on a refueling track and 2-3 of those have offloaded their assigned allotment, but yet have extra fuel on board not needed for the RTB transit: they can top off the remaining birds and allow then to continue to remain on station providing the extra capability to the strike aircraft. This is used more often when theres a mix of KC-135's and KC-10's. The 135's will offload that extra fuel to the 10's and allow them (KC-10's) to remain on station longer. Flexibility is the key word here. The longer that you can remain on station providing fuel, the longer that fuel is available to the birds that may need it. The mission of the tanker fleet is to provide flexibility in it's fuel offload tasking. A tanker airframe bringing extra fuel home: sitting on the ground, or returning to base (RTB) to top off for another mission, isn't supporting the mission requirements to it's fullest potential..

(I use the KC-10 - KC-135 scenario as an example. There ARE 135's that can receive fuel as well, but very few are in the fleet.)

ThudDriver

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