We get -E’s here at Geilenkirchen all the time. Except for the one time we get a pair of -D’s, which are just like -Es except being converted from old RC-135A’s. Those are rare though, there are only four of them and they fly with 117ARS / KS ANG.

You won’t see an Hawaiian 737-style mishap with the KC though. That Hawaiian bird was the 737 with only second most cycles-per-flight-hour in it’s service life, and when the accident happened it was fatigue-wise well beyond it’s safe life. -135s are built fail safe, which means that most structural parts are able to sustain far more metal fatigue. Having far lower hour/cycle ratios and having only very few windows also helps a lot.

I would need to check, but i don’t think any -135 accidents had anything to do with fatigue. Inflight blowups yes, faulty stabilisers (the Geilenkirchen crash) yes, but fatigue? Don’t think so.

That was back in the days when they still were glass. It has been a serious allegation though, USAF guards often get a bit nervous from planespotters (as they should 😀 ), but back then they could go completely paranoid if you had a cell-phone. It has happened a few times that the local police had to be brought in to prevent those cellphones from being confiscated.

Utter rubbish of course. Planespotters waste whole days being bored near airbases, do you really think their subversive plots are that simple?

Nermal, it only got really obscene when you added the 😮 icon…

😀

😀 Cool!

I wonder if there’s any hit-potential. Take some annoying gabber beat, and add a lovely nostalgic Commodore-64 game tune. I know DJ Arthur would play it.

Well Flood, just have a go at
Being yourself a romantic poet
Get her in the sack
‘t will cut us some slack
Even if she will only just blow it

….ehr…. sorry.

Here is the All Your Base Shockwave thingie. With a nice good-old fashioned Gabber beat.

Sorry, didn’t mean to annoy you guys. But i can’t say i really mind them coming over here every week: it’s a steady source of KC-135s for me. If those were regular force deployments, they would undoubtedly last for eight months or so, and that would get a little boring IMHO. In stead, we sometimes even get nice HH-coded 135s. I guess for them a trip to Geilenkirchen is about as bad as a desert trip for other people… Too bad one of those PA ANG birds crashed over here a few years back, they have gotten far more restrictive in taking passengers with them.

Oh, and besides the volume of fuel transferred being an advantage of boom refuelling of large aircraft, it’s also nice for the to-be-refuelled aircraft to know that he doesn’t have to rely on his own piloting skills. Putting your plug into the socket with a nimble fighter aircraft is easy, but it gets a bit harder if your aircraft is a big, slow, lumbering beast or in any other sense unhandable. Tu-22 refuellings could last well over an hour, sometimes making the connection could take up 45 minutes alone (of course, the Blinder being a total bitch to fly).