Circa 2000 I was tasked to fly to Nellis for the first rescue of a C130J that had broken down there. We of course (as a C130K) were cock-a-hoop at the prospect. We parked alongside, handed over their spares, took their load on board as we would get back to EGDL long before them and enjoyed a night stop in Vegas with a night in the Luxor casino hotel.
Next day the No 2 engine wouldn’t start and the GE diagnosed a broken FCU. There was a direct Virgin flight twice a week and it was due in a couple of days so we booked back into the Luxor to wait… meanwhile the J was fixed, took its load back and departed.
The Virgin flight duly arrived but of the spares there was no sign… it turned out that the RAF supply system wouldn’t pay the extra cost for priority freight so the box had not been loaded… we had to wait another 4 days for the next flight, at a cost of around $2000 per day in hotac and allowances, way more than the cost of priority freight would have been.
The J was back long before we were, and we didn’t even make it back in our own aircraft which we had to abandon at Goose Bay as it was repeatedly u/s, partly due to the week it had spent sweating in the heat at Nellis (but that’s a whole different story). Not quite the K beats J narrative we were aiming for…