KC135s - draw up a sandbag...
Ah, the joys of short hose tanking on the KC-135. During the 3 years I spent on exchange with l’Armée de l’Air that was all we ever had apart from the odd occasion when we were lucky enough to get the chance to refuel from a VC-10 or KC 10.
You did eventually get used to it and its many traps for the unwary, but by far the most terrifying trips I ever did in my life involved checking out convexees to clear them to lead a pair to the tanker at night. Gawd knows who the genius was who designed the syllabus but as the check pilot, you had the joy of flying night close formation on young Bloggs while he carried out the intercept to get himself in behind at the right time and place without bumping into anyone who was leaving the tanker and then get you both safely into echelon starboard. Why they couldn’t have done a couple more trips in the 2-sticker is beyond me. The bad news was that as number 2 you had to put your radar into standby to avoid co-channel interference (not that looking into the tube while flying night close is an awfully good move), so the only way to get an idea of where you were in the process was from a sneaky look in at the air-to-air tacan distance to the tanker and the odd glance at the INAS distance to the racetrack datum in the HUD. Needless to say, as soon as the weather got a bit ropey and he had to use the radar most of the way in, Bloggs’s SA would start to crumble and all niceties of keeping things smooth for the wingman would disappear while he tried to sort out the intercept geometry, keep to the timing and not roll out in front of the tanker etc.
On one night, that quiet little voice that tells you that things ain’t going quite as they should do prompted me to look up and see that we were practically level with the tanker, which was getting very, very big in the windscreen very, very quickly and I just about had time to react before the inevitable happened. At the same moment, Bloggs spots the tanker too, rolls towards me, shuts the throttle and stuffs the boards out – thanks a f*cking bunch, mate. Amazingly enough, and more by luck than judgement, I avoided hitting either him or the tanker. The debrief, shall we say, was somewhat one-sided and I admit that later that evening I partook of strong drink.
The short hose sometimes caught out the experienced guys too. On a very rough night during the Balkans do, one of the lads from our wing was refuelling over the Adriatic, got very high and out of position to such an extent that the hose whipped, taking off the end of his probe (and maybe the basket too, but memory fails me) which then went down the intake with inevitable consequences for a single-engined aircraft. Luckily, he survived the MB let-down with nothing worse than a stiff neck and was fished out of the sea by an Italian warship.