Originally Posted by
BEagle
Pure Pursuit, the Voyagers are not 'ours' to modify! They already cost MoD more than £1M
per day for the AirTanker PFI AAR service, so Lord knows what contract penalties would apply if MoD suddenly woke up to the fact that quite a few RAF aircraft would benefit from such a modification.
The K2s would seem the obvious candidates for such modification though. Training boom operators and maintaining their currency might be a problem though, given that the Voyager doesn't have a UARRSI...
So no mutual AAR trips, unlike the Victor or the VC10K.
Beagle, I completely agree however, the cost of using other nation's boom tankers for training and currency is ridiculous. I know that Air Tanker have looked at a boom option but, you're quite right, they'd pull out pants down for it!!
Personally, I think we need it and our current drogue only option is very fast jet centric and rather embarrassing. We rely on other nations assets in order to utilise our ISTAR assets fully. Unacceptable.