"...any aircraft capable of refuelling a Victor in flight, could easily take on its task...."
I think it was in Aug 1985, when the VC10K3 was relatively new, which found us on task somewhere over the North Sea on the way to do some routine AAR. All of a sudden, Starfleet told us to turn back south to RV with a Victor, which had been scrambled to support a QRA intercept, the plan being to top him up before he headed north.
The captain was ex-Victors, so I asked him what the max fuel of a Victor was. I think it was around 58 tonnes; we were already hundreds of miles north of the Victor and still had considerably more fuel on board than he could possibly carry.
So we then suggested to Starfleet that a better solution would be that we should head north to the QRA support task and that the rubber-suited chaps in their ancient bent-wing ex-nuclear bomber should take our routine AARA task. Of course we had the 'codes' and 'red book' on board (as we always did in those days), so comms wouldn't be a problem. They agreed to the idea, so off we went to nab 1 x Bear B and 1 x Bear C in the supreme comfort of a VC10K3 (navigators might disagree), landing after a 5 hr trip.
"Why didn't they think of that?", I asked the Captain. "Because they're ground-pounders and we're tanker aircrew" was his reply....
