November 27, 2020
The U.S. Air Force Has a Nearly Fatal Flaw (This Picture Says It All)
These planes keep all the other planes fueled and flying.
by Sebastien Roblin
Key point: Some planes have longer ranges than others. For those that need more fuel to complete their missions, the Air Force has tankers to fill that job.
In 2018 the Air Force plans to bring its first eighteen KC-46A refueling tankers into service—paving the way for the replacements of its vast fleet of KC-135 Stratotankers that date back to the 1950s. The Pegasus should prove significantly more efficient and survivable than its predecessor, but its final rounds of testing have been bedeviled by a few persistent bugs.
Sleek warbirds like the F-15 Eagle and the F/A-18 Super Hornet may attract the most attention, but these aircraft can only reach distant war zones and stay active above them for useful amounts of time thanks to a veritable horde of tanker planes. In fact, the U.S. military’s air-refueling capacity is one off its unique force multipliers—while tankers in most air forces around the globe number in the single digits to the low dozens for China and Russia, the United States operates over four hundred.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-air-force-has-nearly-fatal-flaw-picture-says-it-all-173449