Airmen Turn C-5 Into ‘Huge Floating Gas Station’ with Refueling Experiment
Dec. 21, 2023 | By David Roza
At 247 feet long and with a 222-foot wingspan, the C-5M Super Galaxy is the largest aircraft in the U.S. military—and, as a crew at Travis Air Force Base recently proved in the skies over northern California and Oregon, America’s largest flying gas station.
On Dec. 12, a Travis crew tried out a process called reverse flow air refueling between a C-5 and a KC-10 Extender tanker. Instead of the gas flowing out of the tanker and into the receiving aircraft through the refueling boom as it usually does, the gas went up the other way from the C-5, through the boom and into the KC-10.
Normally reserved for emergencies, this was the first time the technique had been tried with the C-5 since the aircraft was first designed in the 1960s. Airmen with the 22nd Airlift Squadron wanted to see how it worked with the C-5M, the modernized version in use since 2006.
“The whole reason behind doing this was to get some baseline data,” Maj. Justin Wilson, the squadron’s chief of standards and evaluations and C-5M evaluator pilot, told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Now we can see what other scenarios we can use this in.”
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/c-5-super-galaxy-refueling/
