Officers within the Air Drive’s mobility enterprise are contemplating amending guidelines to permit simply two crew members onboard the Boeing KC-46 Pegasus tankers throughout harmful missions, elevating eyebrows amongst airmen.
Air Mobility Command is discussing the choice as a part of the way it could deal with conflict within the Indo-Pacific, the place it believes massive, sluggish jets together with tankers could be extra susceptible to assault from Chinese language anti-aircraft missiles. Shrinking the variety of airmen onboard a tanker might assist decrease potential troop casualties whereas nonetheless getting fight jets the gasoline they want.
A typical tanker sortie entails a pilot, a co-pilot and a growth operator. A loadmaster could be a part of them for cargo missions, or nurses and medical technicians for aeromedical evacuations.
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The Air Drive mentioned the notion of a slimmed-down crew, with one pilot and one refueling growth operator, isn’t set in stone. Nor wouldn’t it essentially turn out to be commonplace process.
“The command is presently reassessing minimal flight crew necessities as we discover and validate new techniques, strategies and procedures oriented in the direction of a dynamic, future struggle,” AMC spokesperson Maj. Hope Cronin instructed Air Drive Instances July 15.
Cronin mentioned the command would want to approve a waiver so airmen can check out the skeleton crew idea in workouts like Mobility Guardian, the Air Drive’s premier occasion for practising army transportation missions.
AMC employees are assessing whether or not a pair of airmen might safely deal with a KC-46 on their very own earlier than they log off on that waiver. Additionally they have to verify the command has the authority to make that change.
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Not everyone seems to be a fan of the suggestion.
On July 15, a Fb web page that’s standard with airmen posted an nameless allegation that AMC had hatched the thought due to a pilot scarcity at McConnell Air Drive Base in Kansas.
“That is going to place KC-46 aircrew in doubtlessly harmful conditions and should … be stopped,” it mentioned.
Cronin denied that the thought is related to pilot retention.
However, meme accounts pilloried the plan on social media — dealing one other blow to the KC-46′s picture amid a slew of technical difficulties which have slowed the tanker’s entrance into common fight operations.
The troubled airframe is cleared to “help 97% of the each day joint drive air refueling calls for,” AMC mentioned June 1, however issues with key elements such the Pegasus’s gasoline growth and distant imaginative and prescient system, which reveals airmen the place the growth is outdoors the jet, preserve it from routinely flying aerial refueling missions.
The Pegasus is meant to be a extra versatile, resilient tanker than earlier designs and carry as much as 65,000 kilos of cargo. Officers anticipate will probably be solely provisionally practical till round 2024 or so, when {hardware} and software program fixes can be found.
The Air Drive plans to purchase at the very least 179 KC-46 airframes below a $4.9 billion contract, however might signal on for extra. For its half, Boeing has collected greater than $5 billion in bills to deal with the tanker’s points.
“We presently cease wanting full combatant command deployments, barring emergency want,” Cronin instructed The Battle Zone.
Rachel Cohen joined Air Drive Instances as senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in Air Drive Journal, Inside Protection, Inside Well being Coverage, the Frederick News-Put up (Md.), the Washington Put up, and others.
