 Technical Sergeant Joseph Anthony Perez from McDill Air Force Base. I am a, what is it, KC-135 crew chief. Been there for, doing that for close to eight years now. So, and having fun. So today, we just accomplished ourselves the first aircraft to aircraft ground refueling in close to almost, let's say like, 40 years. So we just did that today. So the main purpose of an action or an operation like this one is to, if we had a, what is it, a jet that was stranded somewhere that had to do an emergency landing for an Oshiri location that there's no fuel ops, we can go ahead and take our 135, land it in, fuel them up so they can get out of there. So, yeah, yeah. So I mean, the basis of it is that we're literally connecting two airplanes on the ground because most of the time, if you're doing refueling for this one, it's usually a truck or a pit or up in the sky with the 135 or KC-10 and whatnot. So this is literally taking two jets connecting them together and transferring fuel. So making sure that's a possibility for the future. So there's plenty of agencies involved. I mean, I'll just go from literally the ground up. So we've got airfield management to make sure that we actually have a certified spot for this kind of activity, which goes in sides with the hot pits that we do. So if you can do a hot pit on the spot, you can do an aircraft to aircraft on the spot. So we have those. We have safety. We have QA. We have, of course, our maintenance personnel involved, of course, with the folks that come in here from Shaw and, of course, our leadership from the group level and Afson, of course, which approved everything from happening right now. So yeah, a lot of people. It's just a cool thing for everybody to be able to do for a first time in a long time. So it's awesome. I'm Major Holly Gramko and I'm the commander of the 379th Expeditionary Aircraft Maintenance Squadron. So today what my team did was the aircraft to aircraft ground refueling between a KC-135 and an F-16. It's a procedure that has been in the KC-135TO for years, but it fell kind of out of use several years ago and we're trying to bring it back in an ace kind of concept way. What we're looking at doing is providing options in an AOR for doing ace. The best place for a KC-135 to be is in the air for doing refueling, but in the case that a fighter diverts to a location that doesn't have a US spec fuel, or if the KC-135 needs to go in to recover some fighters or provide a quick kind of recovery, then we can do this. All you need is a hose. It has two fuel nozzles, one on each side and a valve to regulate the pressure. And so you eliminate the need for extra personnel such as POL, you eliminate the need for an R11 truck and we're able to offload. Even if we've landed at say 20,000 pounds, we can offload and refuel at least two or three fighters off of that and get them back in the air. Sure, so this project was started by the last rotation of leadership for the EMXG and AMXS out here. They had this idea to kind of revive this procedure in an ace style format and they purchased the hose. We actually bought three hoses. It came out of squadron funds and they tested out some different concepts and we actually did one a few months ago where we ran the hose from the KC-135 into an R11 just as a proof of concept, make sure the hose worked and didn't have any issues. And so this has really been months in the making to make sure that we could use this procedure safely and effectively. And now really the next steps, you know, this project isn't over. Now we're going to look at how can we develop the hose to be lighter weight, more agile, more mobile so that we can go in and get it out of the aircraft and back into the aircraft easier. And then also we're working with our ops counterpart. So we had our air crew out here today as well and they sat through our maintenance procedure with us of running the engine so that then they can ride a dash one checklist and eventually ops would be able to bring the aircraft in without turning the aircraft over to maintenance and do this procedure and get both aircraft back in the air with minimal time on the ground. Absolutely. So I have an incredible team out here. You know, one of the challenges with a project like this is because it goes through so many rotations you kind of lose some of that momentum. But what this team did that came in was they got motivated right away. They were looking forward to executing this and coming up with new ways to do our mission and do ace out in the Air Force. And so they just did an incredible job. Everything went smoothly and we were able to effectively demonstrate this capability today. And hopefully we can kind of extrapolate it out to the rest of the Air Force especially in the Pacific AOR and some of the future fight stuff we're looking at over there. And so we just wanted to see if we could do it, do it safe, effective and then be able to sell this to the rest of the Air Force to go out and do it. Oh yeah. So the idea of finding new ways to do refueling or to do integrated combat turns where you can refuel and reload a fighter to get it back in the air quickly is not new to look for new ways, but it's really interesting what the team did here which is taking an old procedure or an existing procedure to convert it over. And so I know a C-17 recently refueled a bomber in much the same way out at, I'm not sure where it's at, but I know a C-17 did this recently. The KC-10s at PSAB are looking to do something similar. And so I think it's really cool that I have this great team that's able to execute this and then we're going to be able to share it with so many other units and get everyone on board to look for new ways to get our job and our mission done.