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Originally Posted by KC10 FATboy
Take a KC-10 or KC-135 that needs to "operationally" dump fuel, and you suddenly loose any hopes of fuel savings for the year across the entire fleet. I've never had to dump operationally, for an emergency yes. But I've seen or directed *lots* of tankers to dump for operational reasons. The system simply isn't designed for fuel saving. It is designed to be effective, not efficient.
Exactly. I can't count the number of times 135s have either requested or been told to "adjust gross weight" over the AOR, or request to "consol" into a KC10 (who ends up burning a lot of that gas on the drive home) so they can land back at Manas, or be able to refuel A10s.
It's always funny, ironic, and really drives home the point on how serious the Air Force must be about fuel savings [sarcasm] when you see all the workup about how we're going to save fuel in AMC, how we're going to save millions of dollars a year by taking toilet paper out of the jets and landing just above min fuel, but then you get to AFCENT, who apparently hasn't gotten this fuel savings "memo", and are flying Delta configs around Afghanistan for hours/days/weeks at a time. Or you see the mismanagement of tanker assets, and the amount of gas that is wasted every day because of this. Suddenly taking the survival kit off your jet, or making sure you land with less than 30K doesn't seem so important.
I understand that every penny counts, and a dollar saved here can be used elsewhere (at least in an ideal world), but if the Air Force is really serious about saving fuel, then they should apply the big fuel saving techniques everywhere, not just in one command. It's like the Air Force is saying "do as we say, not as we do", when they will delay a home station mission or local to change the configuration of an aircraft to remove 50+ seats (5000lbs) for a 6 hour flight, but then in the desert not even make an effort to change configurations, and leave Delta config aircraft on the line for weeks at a time flying 8-12 hour sorties every day, probably wasting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year.
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Heck, as an examiner pilot, pilots and crew would look at me like I was nuts if I suggested they fly an endurance speed between air refuelings with a significant loiter time -- which was procedure. That never happens unless they're in a fuel starved situation or they have troops in contact.
Are you talking about the tanker aircraft or their receivers?
I would say that the majority of KC10 crews slow to endurance speed between ARs, especially so in the desert - it's pretty much the standard procedure I've been taught in the -10 world.