In flight refueling is pretty much a survival
skill for a fighter pilot, especially if he's in the US
Navy.
(lots of pics, dial-up readers
are forewarned)
All fighter designs are compromises - make a
fighter big enough to carry a lot of gas, and you generally pay a performance
tax. Building more fuel capacity makes the jet larger, requiring larger, more
powerful engines to drive it at high subsonic and supersonic speeds. These
engines in turn will generally use fuel at a faster rate, meaning diminished
returns on the investment. A larger fighter is also a disadvantage on the
carrier, where the real estate cost per square foot is probably the highest in
the world.
But having a smaller fuel
capacity greatly impacts flight operations, since "short-legged" fighters don't
have the endurance required to support maneuvering the ship during cyclic
operations - one of the great advantages that aircraft carriers have over
airfields is that you can move them around, hide them and
such.
The FA-18, which some of you
may know is where I passed most of my time spending your tax dollars, is
considered at the lower end of the fuel bearing margin for a naval fighter.
So we have to learn to get good at
in flight refueling. Success means you get to keep fighting and flying. Failure
means you get to either 1) Force the ship into the wind early so you can land,
and then receive an invitation to take that extended climb of shame leading from
the flight deck to the bridge, in order to be graced with a short but exciting,
one-way conversation with a thoroughly grumpy carrier CO (and you know how Navy
captains can be...) or 2) You get to do the Martin-Baker arrival (i.e., eject)
when your plane runs out of gas. Because every aircraft that takes off is going
to land one way or the other. This second scenario will bring you to a long
green table, with many grim faces around it and no water glass in front of your
chair.
The first time I'd ever
"tanked" was in the training squadron in Lemoore, California (don't bother
looking it up - you wouldn't want to go there. If you stop your car there, don't
turn the engine off: It might not start again, and you'd be stuck.) Tanking is
at first a highly unnatural act - for all your flying career up to that point,
you will have been taught to scrupulously avoid hitting any part of your
aircraft that isn't landing gear against anything that isn't concrete.
But now you are expected to maneuver
in very close proximity to another aircraft, await patiently while he un-spools
a relatively short refueling hose, extend your refueling probe and then place it
inside the refueling basket. Which isn't at easy as it sounds, at
first.
Oh,
and when that's over you'll be expected to do it again at night. Because it's
darker, which of course makes it
harder.
And we're all about making
things harder.
When your probe is out,
you approach the basket using 3-5 knots of closure, looking to seat your probe
exactly in the center of the refueling
basket.
If
you miss the basket, the odds are 50-50 that your overshoot will cause the
basket and hose to thump against your fuselage, which in the best of cases gives
you a nasty start, and in the worst cases either knocks off an angle of attack
probe that will almost certainly be swallowed by your jet intake, causing all
kinds of horrible damage to one of the things that makes airspeed, or else get
wrapped around your probe, leaving you in a rather uncomfortable position. And
by the way, you didn't get that gas you were there
for.
If you "lip" the basket, meaning
the probe hits the outer rim, the basket will slap your fuselage again, etc,
etc.
And here's the interesting thing -
as you approach the basket, the turbulence around your jet's nose will cause the
hose and basket to move up and away from your jet. At this point you have to
have confidence, because the physics of the matter are that it will swing back
down again and let your probe ram home.
Most of the
time.
Except when it
doesn't.
But if you "chase" the basket,
it surely will fall back again towards your aircraft you'll lip the outer rim,
the basket hits your fuselage and etc,
etc.
Sometimes we get gas from Air
Force tankers, which is really cool because they carry so very much of it. Navy
tankers have to land aboard the ship, so the amount of fuel that they can give
is measured sparingly (oh, so sparingly) by the same kinds of performance
trade-offs mentioned earlier in this
post.
There are two kinds of tankers in
the USAF inventory, the KC-10 and the KC-135.
The KC-10, when missionized for Navy
tanking (they do these things differently in the junior service) has a drogue
and basket assembly very similar to what we are used to in the Navy - only
bigger. Most pilots prefer this system, but I have my reservations: Sometimes
the take-up reel (which absorbs the shock of the IFR probe's impact) doesn't
work as it was designed to do - this causes a sine wave to develop in the hose
itself, which travels up to the tanker, then back to your jet (with emphasis)
often snapping off the refueling
probe.
Which can lead to all sorts of
unpleasant consequences, not least of which (in the short term) is that you
didn't get the gas you were there
for.
The KC-135 on the other hand, has
a rather short, hard rubber hose and a massively heavy refueling
basket.
I
actually prefer the -135, once you're used to it. The basket doesn't move as
much on the approach, and if you're at least half way towards the socket, your
probe will slide home.
On the other
hand, the -135 isn't known as the "Iron Maiden" for nothing in the service, and
getting hit by one of these things can shatter your canopy, turning your warm,
comfortable, familiar environment into a 300 mph maelstrom.
I've always like the word maelstrom,
by the way.
Anyway.
The
stories of nuggets "stalling at the basket" are legion - guys get right to the
tipping point, and somehow can't move the throttles up that last little bit to
close the deal. Once over the sea of Japan, I hectored a young guy with one word
as he stalled at the basket -
"Courage."
He got in, we got our gas,
and we got the mission complete.
This
is probably as good a time as any to share with you an anecdote that I received
from an officer I used to work with (interspersed with my
translations):
Since
it's probably been a few months for you, I'll have to tell you about the quite
unpleasant experience I had with the good ol' Iron Maiden 2
nights ago... I
volunteered to be the sacrificial "back-side tanking" section of hornets so we
wouldn't have 4 sections simultaneously vying for use of
the same target. It
was an 1830 launch, 2000 recovery and as we headed west towards the target
watching the sun set the scattered clouds became
more broken and
finally overcast. The bombs (actual GBU-12's!) never got dropped, and we headed
back to the ship to find the KC-135 in order to
get back on ladder
(ed: fuel state required for
recovery). It was right
overhead mom (the
carrier) with only one chick
(fighter)
in tow, but it was clearly in and out of the clouds, judging by the way it lit
them up through the goggles (night vision
devices, NVG's). "No worries,
I'm sure he'll get clear" I thought. The rendezvous progressed ok, but the
tanker spent more time in the clouds than out. NVG training rules aside, the
goggles and the radar were fine to keep track of him and his chick. Fortunately
my wingman took off his goggles early and got complete vertigo during the join
up - his exact words were "I think I'm upside down". I convinced him he wasn't
and we got his mental gyro re-caged by the time we were in port observation. I
made my call and was cleared into pre-contact. As I settled out the jet behind
the beast, it didn't feel terribly bumpy, but the basket was ALL OVER the place.
I remember thinking to myself how the 135 is supposed to be a little more stable
than that as I made the approach. Not even close. I think my radome made it
closer to the center of the basket than my probe. Another try, another,
another...I asked if the boom was locked down - of course it was, and after
another few minutes of stabs and I got in - along with a 2 inch spark of static.
That was comforting. Staying in the basket turned out to be even harder and I
damn near tore that hose off due to all the bouncing around. We never did get
back to VFR (visual flight rules - clear
weather). I got my 2K
(2000 pounds of gas, roughly 300
gallons) and gleefully eased
out, thankful I still had all my probes intact and bummed that it took me so
long. My wingman never got in and I told him to give up so I could find him a
Hoover (S-3 Viking - so known because the
sound of its engines is remarkable similar to a vacuum
cleaner). Clearly the most
difficult tanking experience of my young
life.
The next
cycle not ONE JET got into the basket which made me feel a little better about
my flailing so much. There are times it's good to be
sitting on
Mom.
Too true - it is wisely
said that "It's better to be on the deck, wishing you were in the air, than in
the air, wishing you were on
deck."
My most exciting personal
tanking mission (the competition is fierce) is when I was in the Arabian Gulf
prior to an Operation Southern Watch mission, and refueling off an S-3 in a
"sucker hole" among some thunderstorms. We were ringed pretty tightly on all
sides (you do
not
want to fly into a thunderstorm at the best of times, far less when tanking), so
the Viking pilot had the turn wrapped up pretty tight, and just getting into the
rendezvous position was an act of will, as much as airmanship. Just as I settled
into the basket, a static electricity discharge (read: lightning bolt) arced
from the clouds to his jet, down the hose to my
jet.
It felt really, really weird. I
felt the shock enter through my right hand on the stick and exit through the
sole of my right boot, having bounced around for a moment in the fillings of one
of my molars. The gas stopped flowing (the refueling store itself had gone
sneakers-up), and I was pretty sure that there was a hole somewhere in the
aircraft's skin (there usually is, when the electricity exits the jet). And I
still had a four-hour mission in Iraq, which I couldn't possibly execute without
additional gas.
So I did what any of
us would do: I called back to the ship, and asked for the position of the
nearest functional tanker.
Posted @
06:17 PM
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Posted in
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Sendit
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Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
