a military question

[blacksheep]

watching a show on Discovery Wings today and they were showing a group of FA-18s in an air to air refueling set up and started wondering
Why does the navy use the hose and basket system and the air force use the retractabele boom with the wings?

[AAFO_WSagar]

Re: a military question

Originally posted by blacksheep
watching a show on Discovery Wings today and they were showing a group of FA-18s in an air to air refueling set up and started wondering
Why does the navy use the hose and basket system and the air force use the retractabele boom with the wings?

Blacksheep... just a WAG here based on countless hours of watching the DW channel, both while awake and asleep.. (it's my companion, what can I say.. ) I'd say it's due to the fact that a lot of the Navy refueling is done by carrier based tankers. Tankers usually much smaller than the AF tankers and there is not room for a boom operator to be in the back doing the "third pilot" job of "flying" the boom into place..

Again, a WAG but, likely fairly spot on.. Any current or ex Navy guys have any better idea??

Wayne

[blacksheep]

the one I was watching at the time was a full size tanker , one of the big tri engined jobs

[AAFO_WSagar]

Originally posted by blacksheep
the one I was watching at the time was a full size tanker , one of the big tri engined jobs

Blacksheep... I saw that one too, was it the one where they went over to fly against the Germans?

I suspect, since the Navy guys use an outie, and the AF guys use an innie, it would make no difference, they'd still have to "fly the basket" rather than "fly the boom"..

Again.. hoping some Navy guys will come in and set the record totally straight on this..

Wayne

[DJAMALD]

The US Navy does a lot af air to air refuelling with RAF Tristar tankers wich are only equiped with the hose and drogue system.

Maybe that was the one you mentioned. Also a few KC-135 R's are equiped with the hose system alongside the boom.

Djamald

[Unregistered]

The Air Force uses KC-135's with a boom and HC-130 with hose/drogue system. The Marine Corps uses the KC-10 with a boom. To re-fuel helicopters, I have only seen the hose & drogue system used . For fixed wing, both are systems are used. Since the Navy uses aircraft carriers, it seems the hose & drogue system would be an easier fit into existing airplanes. Also, Navy tankers have be able to refuel helios & planes. Finally, when did the Air Force and the Navy agree to anything the same way




Keith Doyne

[speeddemon]

Most of the time, Navy aircraft are out in the middle of the ocean, and must depend on aircraft that are 'organic' to the Battle Group in order to refuel....like the S-3 and (in the past) the A-6 with 'buddy packs' strapped on.

Those packs are hose/drogue type installations, because they are easy to remove/convert.

And it's kind of hard to bring a KC-10 or KC-130 along with you on the carrier....despite that neat trick they pulled off on JAG a couple weeks ago.

Speeddemon

[Unregistered]

My understanding is this:

The Navy (and most of Europe) hose/drogue system is much lighter, simpler, and can be deployed as a "strap on" system to a number of host tankers, and in some cases 1 tanker can simultaneously refuel several fighters.

The boom system used by the Air Force has one big advantage: it can deliver fuel at something like 3 to 5 times the flow rate of a hose and drogue system.

The Air Force refuels B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s as well as C-5s, C-17s, and C-141s. The amount of time they'd have to stay "on the hose" of a Navy style hose-and-drogue system is why the Air Force uses the boom. The other system is more versatile, and can be used with helicopters, but would take forever to gas up a BUFF.

[Unregistered]

As a former Air Force type I have to agree that the probe and drouge system suits the Navy since it can be pod mounted on the old A-6 and carried by the old A-3s and current S-3s. I think even A-4s could act as tankers. Maybe a Navy guy can elaborate.

Remeber that Air Force F-100s and A-37s and F-104s also used the probe and drouge (I know I'm not spelling that right) and the helicopters still do. I think the Thud, at least the B model, could use either system.

The big issue with the hose and basket, besides the aforementioned flow rate, was that the bow wave of the big airplanes (B-52, C-141, C-5, E-4, C-17, etc) would simply push the basket out of the way.

Another plus is that a really good boomer could stab you and get you hooked up in turbulence or if you had flight control problems. You could always tell a new boomer-they pretty much just hung the thing out and you had to fly yourself on to it. It took some time before they became confident in flying the boom into your IFR door. I would think that hooking up to the hose and basket would be very challenging in turbulence or at night compared to the boom but as I said I was an Air Force F-4 guy so I only experienced the boom.

Ron Henning

[Reever]

Some of the KC-10's at Travis have two of the "Strap On" hose and basket system. One under each wing, some distance out board of the engines.

I went to an airshow at Lemoore NAS in 1966. An A-4E with a buddy pack was refueling an A-3 and the A-3 was refueling an F-8E! All at the same time.

Ahhhh, the good ole days.

[Unregistered]

Originally posted by Unregistered

Another plus is that a really good boomer could stab you and get you hooked up in turbulence or if you had flight control problems.

Ron Henning

I've also heard stories of damaged fighters being "towed" out of harm's way and to a safe ejection area on the boom. True or urban legend?

Steve L.

PS- Also have seen photos of booms converted to hose/basket systems with an attachment (for lack of a better word). KC-10s and KC-135s are nothing if not versatile... :-)

[Reever]

We use to see the 940th with KC-135E's fly out of McClellan with that basket hose attatchment to the boom. On takeoff, that thing sure was moving around alot!

[Ron101502]

regarding towing by boom-although the normal way to disconnect from the KC-135 boom in the F-4 was to push a button on the stick, the recepticle was designed to allow the probe to disengage at a certain load. It was called a "brute force disconnect" for obvious reasons.

I also remember either seeing a picture or hearing of an instance where the boom actually broke off and was stuck in the inflight refueling door of an F-4-about 8-10 of boom sticking out the top of the airplane when it landed (must have been a big fuel spray out of the broken boom until the flow was turned off).

I doubt a tow would ever be possible, although I heard of having the tanker dive to allow a flamed out plane to get on the boom and take on enough fuel to re-light. I believe that account is in the book "Thud Ridge" by Jack Broughton ( pretty lousy wingman consideration by the leader to allow is wingman to run out of gas).

I do know for a fact that the "Pardo push" really happened where a flamed out F-4 dropped the tailhook allowing a wingman to push the stricken airplane towards a safe bailout area by pushing the tailhook with the base of the windscree which, if you look at the F-4 closely, is metal. Don't know how much of a help it was but the story was related to us in F-4 school as kind of something to consider to escape capture as well as the barrel roll manuever (useing rudder only) made famous by Duke Cunningham but used by several other pilots as well to get an F-4 with multiple hydraulic failures to a safe bailout area. (Later Air Force F-4s added an electric hydraulic pump whose sole purpose was to power the stabilator in the even of dual Power Control hydraulic failures to make the rudder roll unnecessary).

[Mayo]

the pilot who did the push spoke at the Museum of Flight,
he pushed the other aircraft over the water where his fuel exhausted and they both had to bail out,
he supposed pushing burned a lot of fuel
next he was reemed for causing the loss of two aircraft instead of just leaving the one to go down, shows what the mind set was of thoes who were running the show then.

[Unregistered]

Originally posted by Ron101502
regarding towing by boom-although the normal way to disconnect from the KC-135 boom in the F-4 was to push a button on the stick, the recepticle was designed to allow the probe to disengage at a certain load. It was called a "brute force disconnect" for obvious reasons.

<snip>

I doubt a tow would ever be possible, although I heard of having the tanker dive to allow a flamed out plane to get on the boom and take on enough fuel to re-light. I believe that account is in the book "Thud Ridge" by Jack Broughton ( pretty lousy wingman consideration by the leader to allow is wingman to run out of gas).

I had a chance to ask a friend who flew KC-135Rs about that the other day. He said he'd heard an account (no doubt the same one I've heard, its too similar) of a shot-up F4 during VietNam getting on the boom and then having its remaining engine fail. The story was that the tanker entered a shallow dive to reduce stress on the boom, and towed the damaged plane to a safe bail-out area over the ocean. Supposedly it "brute force disconnected" a few times anyway, and they had to re-join with the fighter flying deadstick and descending the whole way. His take was that you couldn't tow indefinitely (especially a no-gliding chunk like an F4) but that the boom could probably pull hard enough before disconnecting to allow the fighter to glide a whole heck of a lot further than it could without the tanker pulling on it.


Steve