Guess that there are lots of things that we want, but not so many things that we can afford. So, while a probe would have been just ducky, the A330 can already carry a bucket of fuel. As for the boom, it would also have been simply wonderful but our E3s can make do with a hose and I'm not quite sure why we need it for the C17. As for cost of renting someone else's tanker for a bit of boom practice, I doubt whether the economics of renting a boom-ed minifleet coupled with the additional fuel penalty of carrying that draggy thing around for 27 years would quite stack up.
Overall, I guess it comes down to why do we need these aircraft and right now, tanking is probably not at the top of the list. But I think that we can be fairly confident of one thing with this programme and that is that there will be an A330 on the line, on time in late 2011.
