ORAC is right - was it ARA 1 in Scotland?

Crazy Near Miss During Air Refuel | Military.com

Boom is safer? I'd rather have a flexible hose between the aircraft than a rigid boom.

I think in my day winding and trailing overland was to be avoided unless operationally essential. I don't think we bothered too much about refuelling over land. I think we were obliged to trail over land crossing France (or did we just leave the hoses out)? French fighters used to police the refuelling areas, sometimes resulting in diplomatic escalation.

We certainly trailed and rewound our hoses when doing AAR over France. Never left them trailed once AAR was complete.

Is it true that a boom driver once stabbed an A10 pilot in the chest?

There is (as I type on Friday morning) a French Air Force C-135FR tanking an RAF Sentry over Cornwall in AARA10W.

Fairly sure I night tanked from a VC10 over the Great Glen in about 95. Not Op Workup either as I seem to remember (although the chaps from Hereford were involved in the sortie so who knows?)

Flap62, October 1994, perhaps?

Oh, perhaps. Might have to dig out the logbook. Twas pretty dark tho!

Tanking over land is one thing, but trailing the hoses is another as they occasionally came off on extension. Many years ago, a 101 Sqn crew were considering trailing over land in Scotland as they were running a bit late. The co-pilot was a very wealthy and much landed chap known as Bisto (Thick and rich). He checked his map and informed the Captain that it was OK to trail, as he owned that bit of Scotland!

Dan, do you remember any incidents, other than the German incident I described in post 11? No doubt that wasn't the only occasion, just the only one I knew about.

101 had to loan a VC10K to Boscombe for some receiver trial or other - the usual handbag session between Brize and Boscombe over who should fly the aircraft resulted in a Boscombe crew being allocated.

Off they went to the North Sea and trailed the hoses. The left trailed as normally, but the right went to full extension, kept going and departed.

It wasn't due to any error on behalf of the Boscombe crew, apparently it was a failure of the jettison assembly. But did we give them any stick about their trip? You can probably guess! They'd taped the CCTV and intercom, so we saw and heard the whole thing in the crewroom afterwards!

Bisto was indeed a 'bloody nice chap' on 101, but rather like Tim-nice-but-dim, he only had Harrovian levels of mathematics. After he once announced "You can't have a minus minus a plus!", he had the task of sorting out the imprest figures taken over by his long-suffering captain!

Going to and from Maple Flag exercises in the early '80s we (Buccs) would tank from Honington to Goose Bay and then tank between Goose and Cold Lake from a Victor. We also did a Goose Bay detachment in early '82 when we had a Victor with us and would tank overland on most sorties.

At Lossie we had a Bucc tanker where the crew one day trailed the hose which just kept going and detached, at which point the pod caught fire (hydraulic fluid, I think) so they had to jettison the pod! Luckily, that was somewhere over the Moray Firth.

Hope they trailed and wound the hoses over the lakes! :ok:

Did tac LL AAR with a Bucc tanker "Oop North" once. Got enough fuel to go home. :)

OAP

I remember training a student and impressing on him that when trailing the hoses to monitor their deployment, this we did, we then watched the basket on the right hand hose start to spin and twist the hose until it failed, we lost about five metres of the hose and the basket, thankfully, we were over the sea!