Sometimes, the problem isn’t the receiver, its the number of tankers available. I recall one situation over the southern Indian Ocean flying from Perth when we had two KC-135As to refuel a single WC-135B weather aircraft on a long distance mission to do atmospheric research. We couldn’t do the entire mission because the tankers had to retain so much fuel that when we got all the way to the second A/R, they could only offload a small fraction of their fuel load because it as a loooong way back to Perth! A couple of people questioned that but after showing them that most maps of the world made in the U.S. go north to the pole, but only show the southern hemisphere to 60 degrees S they got the “picture”. There’s a lot of additional water down there!

One other situation: in 1976 we (the USAF/SAC) decided to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the US by flying an SR-71 around the world to set a new speed record for a non-stop around-the-world flight. It would have cut the existing record (set by a B-52 I think) in half or more I think. In the process of planning the flight, we discovered there were not enough tankers (KC-135Qs capable of refueling the SR) in the USAF inventory for the attempt. When you added the primary tanker, the air-spare (in case the primary aborted or broke), and in some cases a ground spare (to replace a broken air spare) the 50 or so Q-model tankers in the inventory (some were always down for routine/depot maintenance) weren’t enough. A few years later when the KC-10 was also available we might have made it, assuming MAC would have lent SAC about a dozen or two KC-10s.

The bottom line: each situation requires careful planning and depends on what you are doing and where you are going. The basic planning rule is never let the receiver (or receivers) get below the onboard fuel necessary to get to an emergency divert base.

My dad worked on both programs when I was a kid in Seattle. He wasn’t a senior guy at the time, just one of the minions buying parts from sub-contractors, but we talked about it later. The original aircraft wasn’t a KC-135 or a 707, it was the 367-80 prototype which was developed to test the concepts of a jet transport for many uses. It’s fuselage was the slightly narrower one later used on the KC-135. The Air Force (SAC in particular) was desperate for a jet tanker to keep up with its jet bombers, and didn’t care about too many other mods (although they did lengthen the fuselage a little from the -80) and ordered them in 1954. Getting them into operation was a far higher priority. By about late 1955 they were beginning to line the ramp at Renton and had production priority over the civilian 707 effort. The original 707 airline design fluctuated a little due to the width issue, but quickly went to the wider fuselage because, among other things, Douglas proposed the DC-8 with 6-abreast seating which the airlines were happier with (not much extra cost, 30 extra seats to sell!). By this time the tanker was well into production and initial operations and met SAC’s needs.

There were some later buys of the bigger, wider cabin version, called C-137s, but only a few for special purposes, not tankers (for instance, the President’s “Air Force One” aircraft were VC-137s). One of the factors in the original decision, according to my dad, was that at the time with all the B-47s and B-52s coming on line, tanking capability wasn’t any more important than the number of “booms available”, so getting the KC-135A into the inventory fast was as, or more, important than a two or three year delay to redesign a bigger, wider, heavier aircraft just to get another 10,000 or 15,000 pounds of fuel offload. Besides, I don’t think the newer, more powerful fan engines (TF-33s) were available at the time so the bigger heavier aircraft probably would have not produced more real offload anyway.

rgr. But why fly so low decomissionized planes roasting in the desert? IMOHO, anybody would be happy to have a bit of clear airspace under the plane. 😉

There are plenty of photos on this site that indicate there are lots of pilots who don’t seem to mind flying low (see the “How low can you go” thread). If someone gave me a jet and said “Go fly it.” a little low level time would be fun. Now that I think about it, I did exactly that years ago in T-33s while stationed in the southern Arizona desert; we had virtually no specific rules and it was VFR flying, so some of it got down to 500 feet or less over the desert!

It does. Excessive tail wind usually leads to an unsuccessful start due to a failure to ignite the fuel properly. The net result is akin to a massive fuel leak.

This used to be a big problem in the old T-33. If you had more than 10-15 knots of wind from the rear it was very hard to start and frequently had hot starts (above max starting EGT). The maintenance guys would frequently turn the aircraft early in the morning to face the forecast wind. Kind of a pain in the rear, but easier than having to inspect a bunch of aircraft after hot starts.

Yes. Went down about 15 miles NW of the base.

?

Since there really is no specific criteria to define stealth (other than degree of…), I’ll choose to define a stealth aircraft as any aircraft intentionally designed to reduce its “observability”. In 1960, when Lockheed was developing the A-11/A12/SR-71 designs, detection by radar was an issue to be dealt with. They specifically analyzed the radar reflectivity and made design changes to reduce radar return (canting of the vertical stabilizers and use of composites in some areas to name a few). As such it was the first aircraft to be intentionally designed with features to reduce radar return to lessen its susceptibility to intercept. In that context, Lockheed contends that it was the first “stealth” aircraft. Of course, the degree to which it was stealthy is significantly less than current generations of “stealth” aircraft, and in this case the term only addressed radar…lowering the IR return was not a player, and the “boom” was not exactly hidden. So, it was a relatively “stealthy” design in the 60s, but by 21st century standards its not in the class of any of the modern low observable aircraft.

At the same time, it’s speed was also considered as part of the defensive package. Not exactly “stealth”, but if you couldn’t “see” it enough in a temporal sense to maintain a hard track, you couldn’t track it with the accuracy to hit it with a missile…its in and out of your envelope before you can react.

Additionally, although I don’t have hard knowledge, I doubt if it was fired on all that often (“…up to 1000 SAMs”) although tracking and lockup attempts may have occurred more than a few times. I personally know of only one actually observed shot (by the crew)…a North Korean shot that missed by a wide margin. There may have been a few more, but anywhere near the 1000 number is probably overstated.

Hard to understand why the Global Hawk program didn’t specify at least comparable service ceiling, payload and sensors as the U-2 to begin with. There’s only so much you can do with a UAV with 20,000 ft lower altitude, half internal volume, 3/5th payload and engine power.

Because when initiated, the Global Hawk program was not a DoD acquisition program, and not designed to meet a DoD mission need. It was a DARPA (actually ARPA, at the time) technology development program designed to investigate the concept of unmanned platforms and a new type of acquisition process called “Advanced Capability Technology Development”, or “ACTD”. The whole program was called the HAE Program (High Altitude Endurance). The Services did not request such an aircraft and were not involved. There were no specified mission requirements other than a few “nice-to-have” developmental guidelines and certainly nothing approaching the U-2’s capabilities. The only hard requirement was to use the ACTD process to produce a “high altitude, long endurance” ISR platform for a fixed price of $10 million each . Everything else was waiverable to get the cost to the $10M number for a production aircraft. Almost all the nice-to-haves were eliminated in the program due to cost problems, and the final estimate for the proposed production was close to $15M, I believe, for the prototype vehicles with very limited capability. After the ACTD program was completed, the platforms could be junked, enter an official development program funded by a Service, or accepted as is by a Service to do whatever they wanted with the left-over asset. A combination of political pressure in the post-Cold War “peace dividend” era and bad info about how cheap it would be (total hogwash but its what Congress wanted to hear) drove the DoD to accept option two and give them to the Air Force to use…perhaps with a little push from the Gulf War to justify the need.

By the way, half the High Altitude Endurance (HAE) mission was to be accomplished by its companion program, DarkStar, which crashed on it’s second test flight and was cancelled, making it impossible for GH to succeed as HAE was originally planned. As the platform was later bulked up to make it a functional ISR aircraft all the additions drove the cost up by many millions (tens of millions) and drove flight performance down by a significant amount as well. Ultimately size, weight, and power problems were killers from day one and continue today. Not a bad little airplane, but NOT what an operator would have called for if asked (and we weren’t, officially, since it was DARPA research, not a Service-approved acquisition program).