Aging Air Force Tankers Fly on Leaky Wings and Prayers

[scottr5213]

ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Md. (Feb. 22) -- At an altitude of 3,000 feet, Lt. Col. Mark Deresky was preparing for a routine landing on the runway inside the snowy rectangle ahead as he called gauge numbers to his co-pilot aboard the KC-135 tanker plane.

"Flaps 30," he read out to 1st Lt. Frank Gilliard, referring to the degree of rotation of the inboard left wing flap.

"Flaps 25," Gilliard answered, reading out its counterpart on the right wing.

The numbers didn't match. Five degrees difference. In 15 years flying for the Air Force, Southwest Airlines and now as an Air Force Reservist, Deresky had never seen "split needles" on the gauges that measure the angle of the hinged wing sections used on takeoff and landing.

At 2,000 feet, he asked the Andrews Air Force Base tower for permission to go around. Adding power, Deresky pulled back the stick to climb, cranking into a right turn as he aborted the landing.

As the pilots ran through a checklist, Tech Sgt. Michelle Spencer, one of two boom operators on the aging aerial refueler, headed back to look out the window at the wings and check the set of the flaps. They appeared flush.

"These flaps don't commit us to anything so if anyone's uncomfortable, speak up," Deresky said as he headed back toward the runway.

"One hundred," the altitude alerter's robotic voice warned. "Fifty. Thirty."

"Nice landing," Spencer said as the plane's wheels touched down.

Minutes later, Tech Sgt. Chris McAlister, who had watched from the tarmac as the plane he keeps in good repair glided in, thought the glitch might be in the gauge. Or a cable connected to it. But his first concern was finding the leak that had caused hydraulic fluid to coat the underside of the right wing.

"It's just like working on a classic car," said McAlister, the maintenance crew chief. "It takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears to keep them going."

No Tankers, No Power

The Pentagon reopens the bidding for a new tanker as early as Tuesday. If the military and Congress need any more evidence that it's time to replace the Air Force's aging fleet of refueling tankers, No. 59-1469 and the other tankers in the 459th Air Refueling Wing here should do the trick. The plane was built during the Eisenhower administration -- the 59 in its serial number stands for the year it was delivered. It is 11 years older than its pilot, who was born in 1970.

The plane is part of a fleet of 415 KC-135 Stratotankers that serve as aerial refuelers for military aircraft and also moonlight as medical transports and cargo carriers. They were built on the bodies of Boeing's 707, the world's first commercially successful jetliner, and first flew in 1956. They were designed to enable nuclear bombers to reach targets deep in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The tankers spent most of their early years on alert, so they logged relatively few flying miles given their age. But as missions have increased -- 59-1469 was scheduled this week to ferry wounded troops from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Germany for treatment -- so has wear and tear on the oldest large fleet of planes in the world.

"Without tankers, fighters aren't going anywhere. If you lose the air bridge, you lose your ability to keep airplanes up," said Brig. Gen. Michael Stough of the U.S. Air Force Air Mobility Command. "They are absolutely critical to every combat operation in the ability to project power."

In Washington, however, the Pentagon's attempts to replace the tanker have projected an air of incompetence.

"This is probably the most fouled-up weapons program in recent history because after a decade of spending many millions of dollars, the government has purchased precisely zero aircraft and hasn't managed to even award the contract," said defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think tank.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Air Force began the process of replacing the geriatric fleet. What followed was a primer on how not to modernize:


One of the worst procurement scandals in decades.
Americans squaring off against Europeans.
Influence peddling.
And, most recently, strong-armed pork barrel politics.

The Pentagon hopes to award a contract this summer. After all the controversy, it appears Boeing will retain its tanker monopoly amid signs Northrop Grumman plans to pull out of the competition.

If that happens, "It will be an indictment of the contracting process at the Pentagon and leave in question whether taxpayers are getting the best deal for their money," said John Ullyot, former Republican spokesman for the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Without competition, we're essentially back to the no-bid lease" to Boeing that started the flawed procurement process in 2001.

President Barack Obama's 2011 budget includes $35 billion for an initial purchase of 170 tankers, with the first joining the fleet in 2017 and the last delivered by 2045. The last KC-135 will be 80 years old by the time it heads to a museum.

If it lasts that long. "Nobody has flown a jet aircraft for this long so nobody can say how much longer it will be safe," Thompson said.

The tankers' engines, avionics and other systems have been upgraded but their fuselages and wings are original. Structural fatigue and corrosion pose the greatest threat. And thanks to its age, the KC-135 burns more fuel, costs more to maintain and spends more time in the repair hangar than all other newer aircraft.

"We got our money's worth out of this thing," said Lt. Col. Rodney Marks, a tanker pilot who was scheduled to fly 59-1469 to Afghanistan this weekend. "Why wait until the parts are falling off to replace them? It's kind of overdue."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates may have halted production of the F-22 Raptor despite fierce political pressure to keep building the stealth fighter, but he's still waiting to replace the aircraft that fuels them.

"This is not sexy," said aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia. "It's a flying gas station that supports sports cars. What are you going to buy -- the Lamborghini or the gas station?"

'We Always Wish for New Toys'

Inside the KC-135 tanker, Tech Sgt. Spencer maneuvers a flying boom into the top of a bat-winged Raptor that has tucked in 40 feet beneath the plane off the coast of Norfolk, Va. From her perch, she can see the fighter pilot's gleaming helmet, though she cannot make out his features behind his mirrored visor.

If she finds any irony that the Air Force's oldest workhorse is servicing its newest show horse, she doesn't say.

Nor does she or the other crew members consider their workplace all that decrepit. And on the surface, she's right. Thanks to constant maintenance, there are few signs of age visible to the naked eye.

There is duct tape on the air ducts. A torn, yellowed paper checklist from another, distant time hangs as an afterthought above the old navigator's desk in the cockpit. Above it on the ceiling, a pair of fuzzy dice hang from a sextant, a pre-GPS instrument used by 18th-century sailors and 20th-century pilots to navigate by the stars.

Back in the dawn of the jet age, before computerized everything, "The idea was to keep it simple," McAlister said. Plenty of redundancy and lots of manual backups -- like the crank the crew could have used to reset the flaps if it had come to that.

"We always wish for new toys" but make due with the old, the crew chief said. Standing in the massive wheel well of the tanker, parked a few hundred yards from Air Force One hours before Obama was to arrive for a campaign trip, he pointed to a polished new fuel cap and a strand of shiny wires intertwined in a bigger bundle of dull and aged ones. There was peeling paint, but no visible rust.

The plane's good looks have been kept up by cannibalizing old tankers in the "Boneyard" near Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona or fabricating from scratch other parts no longer manufactured. But the 59-1469 is clearly feeling its age.

Moments after take off, Deresky's avionics screens -- among the tanker's newer components -- went blank. Gilliard, a rookie flying as co-pilot, took over the controls while the commander began troubleshooting. Soon, the screens flashed back on.

Back at the headquarters of the 459th Air Refueling Wing, Master Sgt. Lionel Washington, the flight line supervisor overseeing maintenance for eight tankers and 59-1469's former crew chief, said the day's mishaps didn't surprise him.

In late 2008, the plane was beached in Hawaii for a week because of a leak in its landing gear. Last fall, it spent six weeks as a "hangar queen" here while crews waited for parts and replaced a busted fuel cell. And two weeks ago, it was grounded for three days in California for a hydraulic leak in a wing not unlike the one detected and fixed this day.

Yet of all the eight tankers in his wing, 59-1469 "is the best aircraft I have," Washington said. "It's one of the most dependable."

[kungfuman]

Nicely put.

Writing a book?

[MIKE JG]

That sounds like a typical day flying at a commuter.

[CelticWarrior]

Sounds like a day flying the Lynx ... when they were new )