Secrets of the F-14 Tomcat: Inflight Refueling

all right let's talk aerial refueling no gas no glory so the air force in the navy have fundamentally different approaches to aerial refueling the air force views the tanker as the male and the receiving aircraft is the female where the navy views that 180 out meaning the tankers the female and the receiving aircraft is the male so if you're a navy airplane looking for gas from an air force tanker obviously you have to make sure it's configured to give gas to a navy airplane and i can tell you on some missions that was an issue flaming out because you did poor fuel planting is not a good option so you paid a lot of attention to your fuel the pilot gauge had fuel flow you can see here the two main fuel flow left and right motor and that's in thousands of pounds per hour and the rio just had a totalizer so you're working together talking about it and making sure that you're always on or above your your fuel ladder and if you're not then you have to adjust either more judicious with throttle movements no after burner stop the dog fighting that you're doing whatever and then as i said in extreme conditions or extremist conditions you either divert or if a divert isn't possible if your blue water ops then you do an emergency pull forward which is very much bad form and something you want to avoid so proper judicious fuel planning is key so think about that as we're talking about the mechanics of in-flight refueling now for my first two deployments they were to the mediterranean and the only tankers i saw were what we call organic tankers which were tankers that were part of the earwing so i tanked off ka-6s a7s that were configured for the tanking mission and s3s so these were all airplanes that were pretty easy to tank off of they had hose and drogue take up reels that's a a docile apparatus and so it was kind of no big deal as the nature of my deployments changed post-desert storm meaning we would sortie through the mediterranean go through the suez canal and spend a lot if not most of our time in the persian gulf the nature of the tanking that we did changed we were doing longer range missions and so that was the first time that i saw air force tankers so this was my third and fourth and fifth deployments and we were doing an operation called southern watch and southern watch was the patrolling of the no-fly zone in southern iraq south of the 33rd parallel to enforce the u.n sanctions on saddam so these were double and triple cycle missions we were airborne for upwards of four hours plus and you would tank during these missions off of air force tankers three and four times in many ways like landing on the boat at night aero refueling on the heavy tanker with a number of airplanes on either wing at night while doing operation southern watch missions was the most dangerous part of that operation in fact on my last deployment we lost two hornets they had a midair in the pattern while trying to rendezvous on the tanker and the pilot of one of the hornets was killed so a typical operation southern watch mission would start with you getting the air tasking order the air tasking order ato came out of joint task force southwest asia located in riyadh so you would read the air tasking order if you had an operation southern watch mission and see who were you tanking off of and so there were basically two types of tankers us air force tankers casey tens which had the nice big hose and rogue like a soft pillow very gentle system and the kc-135 which had a bolt-on hose and drogue that we called the wrecking ball it did not have a take-up reel and so this was dicey and something that we had to get used to especially when we had just started flying in the gulf it was known to take off a lot of probe doors and also probe tips if not the entire probe so launch and you would immediately head to the tanker so i have our training eights here trustee f14 a and then in this case i'm going to use the triple seven the klm triple seven to simulate your generic air force tanker all right so you'd know what the tanker track was where it was it would be annotated on the airplane or the ato rather generally for operation southern watch missions it was a 10 mile race track over saudi arabia or kuwait so launch rendezvous through wingman and go find the tanker so you'd be under e2 control you know your organic airborne early warning aircraft and he would hand you off to the aywax when you got closer which is the the air force airborne early warning aircraft and you'd pick up the tanker via radar operating on the tanker track so where you picked him up you didn't know are you chasing him from behind is he coming at you the other thing you were never really sure of is how many airplanes are on the tanker's wing at any given time so sometimes you would get there and there'd be literally five airplanes on both wings which you know is pretty sporty so this is where rio comes in handy and you'd paint the picture and figure out whether you had to kind of get separation for a rendezvous or whether you were chasing him down eventually as you got close enough the pilot would get a tally and we'd affect our rendezvous so you take your place in the line again you might be number five or six on the wing and when it came your time to tank after waiting patiently you'd say whatever your operation southern watch call sign was and they would differ from the tactical call signs so let's say we're called yankee so yankee one port observation five thousand pounds nose cold nose cold means i have my radar in standby so when i slide back behind you i'm not going to be lighting you up so and you say roger go to pre-contact and so you just slide back pre-contact you'd get just behind the drogue and you'd say yankee one pre-contact and this time now you're talking to the the boomer in the back of the air force tanker kc 10 or kc 135 and he'd say cleared contact and so now you'd make your approach to the basket so like landing on the boat like other things that are challenging for fighter pilots there's a technique so if you look at this video here it's an f-14 tanking off of a lockheed tri-star and you can see the pilot is working very hard and he's jousting a little bit with the drug so he has great patience the rio's most likely giving him some sugar calls here and what he does right is if you miss just back away and try again so sometimes you get out of phase with the basket and chasing it is not a good idea as you can see here sometimes it walks over the nose on the wrong side which happens here as well sometimes it looks like it can get stuck inside the probe and the fuselage so this guy does a good job of hang back try again so here he goes again at this point if i was the rio i'd be saying right right right right come right come right cake forward forward good plug okay you see the take-up reel you drive the basket forward a little bit and now you're looking for some gas and you want to see good flow so great job by the pilot there after a few attempts so the thing about how you make the airplane maneuver to get the plug up is not this up is this and right is not move the stick to the right right is right rudder so if you're using the stick you're going to be chasing the basket and you'll never plug so what senior pilots seasoned pilots would discover is the best way to plug is to chase it and have a trend that was up and right so just right rudder right rudder a little bit of left wing down and then just watch it plug and anticipate also that the bow wave of the tomcat knows making the basket walk away so anticipate that motion but if you're if it's not happening meaning some you'd be in turbulence and the bass could be jumping around i mean i had some crazy days where the basket was all over the place and we were convinced we were never going to tank now sometimes when you joust with the tanker particularly the kc-135 you'd wind up wearing the basket and you can see a picture here of a hornet that did just that in my sophomore effort punk's wing i have a nugget pilot named muddy female pilot who's on her first deployment and she's tanking on the kc-135 and she makes the hose taut a little bit over reaction and snaps the probe tip and winds up having to divert to pakistan so these things happen the other thing that can happen is if you hit a probe in drogue like a kc-10 or a lockheed tri-star if you hit that drogue with too much forward movement you can create a sine wave and the take-up reel can't accommodate it and so that sine wave will go down and come back and snap the basket off the probe and again you'll probably break the probe tip you might fog the engine you might snap the basket off like everything else the more you do it the more confident you become it doesn't get any easier but you become more proficient so as crews went on when we saw the kc-135 on the ato we didn't freak out like we did early on on deployment so now there is a brave new world of tanking coming it's the stingray the mq-25 is in development it's an unmanned tanker that is based on the carrier so it will do mobility tanking recovery tanking and it will also do mission tanking and it's going to reduce the wear and tear on the super hornets because super hunters are being used now and growlers are being used now as the a7s and the s3s were during my time in the fleet and it's expending a lot of flight hours and wear and tear on on these airplanes so we want to get super hornets and growlers out of that business and find a utility for the mq-25 and they've landed on in flight refueling so that's kind of the brave new world of in-flight refueling it'll be interesting exciting amazing to watch an unmanned aircraft work with manned aircraft launching landing tanking mission tanking i just can't imagine taxing around the flight deck with an unmanned vehicle or being behind the jbd and watching an unmanned vehicle go down the cat in front of me that that i just can't see in my mind's eye but that's what's coming all right that'll do it for this episode i thank you for your support we're over 13 000 subscribers if you're a first time viewer please ring the bell become a subscriber i love the comments the likes are very important so thanks for all of the support i very much appreciate it and i'll talk to you again soon

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 181,989

Keywords: F-14 Tomcat, Top Gun, Ward Carroll, Naval Aviation, DCS, inflight refueling, aerial refueling, tanker aircraft, KC-135, KC-10, U.S. Air Force, Operation Southern Watch, no-fly zone, carrier operations, carrier air wing, KA-6D, Intruder, S-3 Viking, A-7 Corsair II, Suez Canal, Saddam Hussein, Southern Iraq, fighter pilots, U.S. Navy, nuclear powered aircraft carriers

Id: fDSC69GKljk

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021