KC135 Hard Landing

This is KC135 landing without front gear, video recording by wing man from the air to landing. This is awsome and skillful of those pilot !

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Howto & Style

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• KC135
• Hard
• Landing

[schlusselmensch]

I once tried boarding a commercial flight with a parachute in my carry-on. It was for a military drone, not a human, so it wasn't a very big package (about 8X8X12). Security was not amused.

[shakkajohn1]

@JeffClancy1966

JP-8 evaporates before it even gets close to the ground. It's also has less impact on the environment that burning the fuel because none of the by products of burning fossil fuels are produces.

[72Rdrunner]

@justforever96 The old "strato bladder" was a brutally simple airplane and I really enjoyed flying it. It was so simple that once you got airborne, you could fly your EWO mission (offload fuel to SAC bombers) with nothing but a battery for electrical power. The flight controls were all manual (rudder was later powered), fuel would gravity drain from wings to engines, gear and flaps had manual backups, and the co pilot instruments ran off their own hydraulic powered generator!

[72Rdrunner]

@justforever96 "Back in the day" (40 years ago) there was a lot of waste, and not just military. I remember when we flew around the pattern with the gear down. One day someone asked, why? as it wastes gas. Presto...started retracting the gear. There were "standard" fuel loads that were really not very precisely analyzed. With time, computers and awareness, today's missions are planned with the minimum required as it takes fuel to haul extra fuel around.

[72Rdrunner]

@justforever96 A lot of effort goes into having just the right amount of fuel for a mission because carrying "extra" fuel means more weight and a higher burn rate. There was no such thing as "routine" fuel dump. It was associated with some sort of emergency where you needed to reduce weight for landing, or in the case of the nose gear up video, to get the fuel out of the forward body tank, just aft of the nose gear.

[justforever96]

@72Rdrunner Hey, simple is good, as long as it works. I think there are a lot of planes and features on planes that are needlessly complicated, adding expense and maintanence difficulties. So does a KC-135 routinely dump fuel before landing, or do they usually only fill it with as much as it's expected to need for a mission? That would make sense, and waste a lot less, but the military sometimes seems to enjoy wasting things

[72Rdrunner]

@767Captain I flew KC135s, 757s, and 767s and trust me you cannot dump ALL the fuel out of a KC135. The wings held 8000 pounds of "standpipe" fuel that could not be drained aft.

[72Rdrunner]

@1hijax That was a "Valid Red" back in the SIOP days. You had to off load all fuel available for offload. Unless you had burned the last 8000 pounds out of the wings and kept all your fuel in the fwd, center, and aft fuselage tanks, (something that would result in a CG probably off the charts) you could not offload yourself out of gas. The "book" answer was to offload all avaiable fuel, clear the stream, and when you ran out, bail out.

[72Rdrunner]

@1hijax Not so, and I know, flew them for 14 years. There was 2000 pounds of fuel in each of the four wing tanks that could not be drained to the aft tank where the air refueling pumps that were used to dump fuel were located. That fuel in the wing tanks was caled 'stand pipe" fuel and could only be used in the engines.

[72Rdrunner]

@schlusselmensch You would kind of do that on a KC135. Move fuel (if you had it) into the aft tank to move the CG aft. There was no "tail bumper" on the KC135...the boom would take the stress...not good.

[72Rdrunner]

@Tcook96 Normally the KC135 landed with a minimal amount (3000 pounds maybe) in the forward tank for CG control, especially at light weights. Since that tank is just behind the nose gear, and is one you can dump from, that's probably what they did.  I flew KC135s for 14 years and was an IP at the school at Castle, still rememer a lot of the procedures.

[72Rdrunner]

@72Rdrunner Unless it was a real time sensitive emergency you normally lowered the boom, don't know why they didn't do it on this flight.