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Originally Posted by tropicdiver
A couple other questions popped into my mind and if the answers are classified, I understand you not answering, but how much fuel do you carry to fill the other jets / planes and is there one of those planes (the B52, perhaps) that can gobble up all the fuel you carry in one fuel trip? How many of the jets (like the F18, F16 or F15's) can you fuel when they come up in groups? How long does it take to fill one of their tanks up? I swear I'm not a spy, just curious.  |
Very little is classified:
Air Force Fact Sheet
We can take off at 325,000 lbs, of which 125,000lbs is airplane wt. and ~200,000lbs of fuel. A common misconception is that the entire airplane is filled with fuel. Actually the wings are full (like most planes) and sections of the "underbody" or where the baggage would be in a commercial airplane contain fuel, the inside of the plane is wide open. If you were to walk into the cargo are it would look no different than walking into a delta airlines jet except that is pretty stripped down (no seats, overhead bins etc).
We can either burn all of our fuel or we can give it all away. The max transfer rate is just over 6,500 lbs per minute (roughly 6.5lbs per gal so 1,000 gallons per minute) Big planes like bombers and cargo planes can take anywhere from 50 to 100 thousand lbs of gas at a time.
Smaller fighters take much less obviously. They normally come up to us in groups of 2 to 4 but that all is based on thier mission. They normally take off in a group and fly the whole mission like that. It takes anywhere between 2-10 minutes to fill up a fighter (depending obviously on how much gas they need) where as a I have been hooked up to a bomber for over 45 minutes.
EDIT: I think Mark was in one of the F-15s although we often fly in groups (2-3) of tankers so he could have been in another tanker.