PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Air to Air refueling.Would you contemplate it?
Old 24th Jul 2005, 15:18
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BEagle
 
Join Date: May 1999
Location: Quite near 'An aerodrome somewhere in England'
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A reasonable amount of progress has been made towards drogue stabilisation and autonomous AAR, particularly for UAV refuelling.

But for any airline application, the boom method would probably be simpler and would provide higher transfer rates.

A commercial airliner would need to take-off to make good a RV time (try telling that to ATC flow control!), climb to cruise level, descend to AAR level, find the tanker, achieve contact, take-on the required fuel load, then depart, climb back to cruise level and continue... If the transfer failed, the airliner would still need to make a safe landing somewhere; if the reason for requiring AAR is to increase ZFW and reduce fuel load, that'd mean arriving somewhere with several hundred pretty annoyed passengers.

And who would sell a ticket for a flight which was intending to depart with insufficient fuel to make its scheduled destination!
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