3engnever, repeated offers were made to the RAF, Airbus (Spain) and AirTanker to come and play with the A310 system in the AARTrax proc. trainer down by Lake Constance as a 'no obligation' observation of what else was already in service. We repeated the offer over and over again, but no-one took it up...
Some RAF AARCs and planners did at least see a very early version, but the RAF couldn't find a travel budget to send an assessment crew for a few days to play with the system at a later date....
Airbus (Spain) saw it in use, but didn't really understand the operational concepts as they sent engineers to watch, not operators.
AirTanker didn't even have the courtesy to reply to e-mails.....
It isn't
that unreasonable to have a 'tanker centric system', really. With fewer but larger capacity tankers in service, the old Victor-era notion of the tankers always going where the receivers wanted them to go is a bit dated. It's actually more efficient in terms of tanker fleet utilisation to find a compromise - just as it was when (was it you,
vasco?) worked out the savings involved in VC10s releasing F3s to Akrotiri, at somewhere like TOSKA but landing in Souda / Iraklion to await the return trail, rather than continuing on to Akrotiri. The only drawback was the need for reliable comms - which was a bit awkward before the RAF issued AARCs with cellphones, was it not
?
MCCE are keen to utilise spare capacity - for example a tanker releasing receivers at the Split Point, before transiting back to base, could be allocated some en-route receivers on the return leg for an opportunity training prod or so for a few 000 kg. Equally, there's no reason why a tanker shouldn't do a little towline work first, then RV with some receivers for a trail. The forthcoming A310 MCS update is quite capable of planning such missions.
A scenario I've just tested is an A310 departing Sicily conducting an RV with carrier-based receivers, trailing them to a cast-off point north of Cyprus, loitering for an hour to support some receivers on CAP, then conducting a post-strike RV with the carrier jets before trailing them back to their carrier (which would have moved to a different station), then landing in Crete. All planned and managed using the MCS - because that's the sort of mission we anticipate our end-users might well need to support in the future.