Originally Posted by
Aeronut
"At least with Nimrod, Waddington could cadge spares from old airframes Kinloss had 'lying about'"
What are you on?
Laphroaig that night iirc, it's called humour, man!!
However, I stand by:
"the airframe is very different from E-3"
At first glance, they look the same. (I beleive every Boeing from the 707/717/C-135/727 and 737 (legacy) line used the same tooling for the nose and cockpit shapes) However, the lines diverged at that point.
The fuselage of the 135 is narrower than that on the 707. and the 135 lacks the 'double bubble' of the 707, the wings and wing roots are quite different from the -320B series 707 that the E-3 is based on. The USAF did re-engineer a number of 135s with tailplanes from redundant 707s, so there is some commonality there!
There may be smaller degrees of commonality in terms of things like u/c components (I'm not that familiar with either airframe) But different fuselage and different wings do not make 'essentially the same airframe'