My most "puckered" approach came in the first half of an attempt to land.

A while back, our command and control had taken most of the authority away from an aircraft commander to choose his or her amount of fuel needed to get somewhere. This is the short version. Yes, all the other Air Force heavy guys reading this, I know there is more to explain but I don't want to bore everyone.

We were doing a simple Presidential support run from Charleston, to Andrews, to San Antonio. A quick, easy, fun filled day for sure. The weather sheets showed the weather at Andrews to be nice, mostly VFR, scattered clouds, etc. So, they didn't plan us with an alternate and only gave us enough gas (so they thought) to get to Andrews, which was a meager 38K or so. For our jet, that's not a lot. They planned us to land at our min gas of 16K. That is when all our lights and bells come on in the jet for min fuel. Also we have some error in our readings when the tanks get that low so you have to figure on a bad reading when you get below 16 or so.

We call and ask, what's the deal? Can't we just get the gas to go to Andrews then to San Antonio? They say, no because the amount of gas we would burn carrying the weight of the extra gas for the 1 hour flight up to Andrews they can't afford. In other words, no tankering fuel.

So, we ask for the extra 5K that we are allowed to ask for. We have just over 40K in the tanks.

We take off and go to Andrews. As we fly North, we hit ORF (Norfolk) and realize that everything under us and heading North is getting increasingly cloudy. As we start the arrival, we notice that the could deck is becoming solid. Nothing scattered about it.

We start to pick up Andrews ATIS. It is below CAT II mins. We can only fly CAT II's. We don't have CAT III capabilities in the C-17. So we listen to Reagan, Dulles, and Baltimore. All below CAT II min's. We are told by Andrews to intercept the localizer 20 miles out and track it inbound and declare our intentions. We look at our fuel and see we only have 20K on board. We look at each other and kind of go, "well, now what do we do?"

We burn about 16K an hour (on average) so that means we got about 15 minutes to no kidding min fuel.

We start thinking about options. Fly out towards the water .... track the loc inbound and trust the radar altimeter and try to land .... get ready to ditch by having everyone get their chutes on .... this is where this approach became my scariest one. Looking around with no landing field around and running out of gas and time. Seriously talking to our crew about bailing out made it pretty real. Then we think about Dover AFB, on the coast in DE. It isn't that far and maybe being near the water it has a better cloud cover. Also, it's by the water so if we have to ditch, we can do it in the Delaware Bay there.

So, we break off the approach, make a right hand turn direct to Dover. We get to Dover and there is a "bubble" under the clouds, giving the field above CAT I ILS mins. So we proceed to Dover and land. All the fuel warnings are going off as we land with about 14K. As we park the jet, and shut her down, the field starts calling for CAT II mins. We just made it.

Now, think back to taking that extra 5K we were allowed. Had we not taken that, we would have landed with about 9K total.

We walk into Base Ops, call our command and control to tell them where we are and why. It was not a pretty phone call.

That's my story.