Having seen the latest picture I too wondered if any pf the prop blades or other debris had penetrated the fuselage. We usually tanked straight and level as I recall
https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....350f9b6628.jpg
(185 kts ?) except for the Falklands airbridge when we did the toboggan descent when tanking the freighter.. As far as I can recall all joins for fuel were commenced on the starboard wing where the Co could see them.
It must be remembered that the RAF C130 tanker only had one (80 ft) hose on the centreline through an aperture in the closed cargo door whereas the US C130 tankers use wing pods I believe.

How easy is it to tank a fast jet from a Herc compared to something like a KC135 or KC10? Idly wondering whether this incident is in part a consequence of the USMC's desire to maintain an independent tanking capability.

Not just USMC, USN must have the same issue. How practical would it be to have a carrier-borne boom equipped tanker?

As with everything, it’s not an issue if you don’t screw up. The point is that a straight join to an astern position provides more opportunity to screw up than a turning join or a straight join to echelon, especially as the final stage of a probe-and-drogue join involves a climb to co-altitude. This naturally encourages the flight path marker to be placed a little closer to the tanker than is probably the case when joining to the boom waiting position.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....94ab17bf0f.jpg
We could tank all the RAF FJ except the Lightning and Jaguar as I recall. Largest I was involved in was the Nimrod. It looked very large and close from my position !

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....114ba6cc84.jpg
Managed to find a pic of a RX in the 'waiting room' before being cleared astern to commence tanking

The point about joining the tanker in echelon means that you can come steaming in and then put the speedbrakes out whilst, as you pull level with the flight deck, announcing you've finally arrived from 70 miles away. Useful in EMCON silent conditions.

Surely you do have to be more circumspect when joining directly astern.

I remember during GW1 on a night towline in NW Saudi, a US Navy S-3 Viking had joined astern, plugged in and started taking fuel before the Eng had noticed. Had he joined on the left and moved abeam the flight deck, I would suggest it would have been safer.

Is this definitely a mid air collision, or could the Herc have had an engine fail, with the resulting debris catapulting back to take out the aircraft behind.

The LiveATC recording linked above has the Herc crew saying they'd had a midair with the F35 and had lost 2 engines. I'd say that was definitive.

The picture overcomes a thousand words:

Double, simultaneous, uncontained failures in 3 and 4, going forward and shredding each individual prop?

I don't think so.

IG

Oops, beaten by Easy Street:ok:

The J model herk is not bad as it can maintain a higher speed than the earlier models. With the earlier model herk you knew you were topped off when you stalled! Tactical tanking especially at low altitude in turbulence was always interesting. The F18 AOA probe was right under the refueling probe. Missing the basket sometimes resulted in knocking off the AOA probe which promptly went down the right intake! Missing the steel basket on the KC135 could result in a smashed canopy or holes in the aircraft. Disconnecting from that basket could be more critical than connecting. If you were not exactly in the position the basket would free stream in as you unplugged the basket would swing wildly around. Easiest by far is the KC10 with a big soft fluffy basket!

As this occurred in the US, between a US crew and a US controller, the most effective way to get the controller’s attention is with the use of the term declaring an emergency.

W-C, if you transmit `Mayday x3`,you should get everybody`s attention..!!

100%!

I've time on the C130, and its a shame we are playing semantics when the Herc guy looks like he did such a great job! But... I'll bite! - after decades of sometimes pedantic sim sessions with a HK airline, I had cause to declare a Pan in Anchorage airspace. The controller simply asked " Err, are you declaring an Emergency?"..... K.I.S.S.

Probably better to leave it at that; let the USA sink back into its isolationist torpor and prevent air traffic in either direction. Put a big impermeable bubble over the whole country.

Boy you got that right. Can't believe some of the stuff I see in this forum. A giant smoking hole in the ground but damn the guy was perfect in his radiotelephoney right til impact. Whew!

The outrage bus must be full to bursting by now - goodness me some people need to get a sense of perspective.

When I first mentioned the lack of MAYDAY call it was an observation made after listening to the audio clip - I think the crew did a really great job getting the aircraft down safely - but the controller asks the pilot if he is declaring an emergency, something that would be made blindingly obvious by the use of MAYDAY.

I have no idea why the US Military have a different RT procedure to the rest of the world (including the FAA) but it seems counter-productive.

Screaming holy **** I had a midair would also get everyone’s attention.

Feel free to dissect what many of the pedants here believe is a systemic training issue of declaring emergency vs mayday/pan, however on that day, the phraseology that was most common to both the flight crew and the controller was “declaring an emergency”

One couldn’t be blamed for believing you were driving that bus given you raised the R/T issue.

Might I politely draw the attention of our colonial chums to Para 1c (1)(a) of Section A-2 of the DoD Flight Information Handbook?

Anyhoo, all aircrew survived what could well have been a catastrophic event - some sound flying skills from that Marine aviator who saved his C-130 crew with multiple engine and system failures.

At the risk of interrupting a lively debate: Looks like a lot of fuel coming out of that wing; anyone know how the ground decontamination is done? Do they just dig out huge volumes of earth and dump it in a landfill?

A very large earth moving operation will be needed although the cost of that compared to the cost of the rest of the incident will be trivial

Semantics
 

I agree we should not get wrapped around the axle about trivial details, since the Herc crew did an amazing job. I will just say though, that if there is one American I will listen to without question it’d be the great Chesley Sullenberger III:

15:27:32.9 RDO-1 mayday mayday mayday. uh this is uh Cactus fifteen thirty nine hit birds, we've lost thrust (in/on) both engines we're turning back towards LaGuardia.

BV

Why use four syllables when two will do?

My dad flew USN F-4s. I recall him describing refueling as closing at some level of minimum thrust and having one engine in burner before being done. Not a lot of performance overlap yet it has worked for 50 years.

Incredible picture. I have one somewhere my dad took of the basket from inside the Phantom as he tanked.

I'm curious to learn more about what happened with the F-35 and KC-130. Incredible flying to get everyone on the ground safely.

Because verbosity is a National characteristic?

But from a grounded eagle, that appears to be masterly flying so I will cut some slack on the r/t procedure.

sycamore -I said nothing about the relative speeds etc during AAR with a C130. I simply pointed out that ATP 56 strongly advises against joining direct astern a probe and drogue tanker. That said, on the that airbridges I did required toboggan because of the lack of spare power in the rx as well as a lack of compatible speed range. If memory serves the hose limiting speed was a major problem.

A bit like this really: :E
How many pilots does it take to change a nav light?

1 to change the nav light and to post that the nav light has been
changed

14 to share similar experiences of changing nav lights and how the nav light could have been changed differently

7 to caution about the dangers of changing nav lights

7 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing nav lights

5 to flame the spell checkers

3 to correct spelling/grammar flames

6 to argue over whether it's "navlight" or "nav light"

... another 6 to condemn those 6 as anal-retentive

2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is
"position light"

15 know-it-alls who claim they were in the industry, and that "nav
light" is perfectly correct

19 to post that this forum is not about nav lights and to please take
this discussion to a navlight forum

11 to defend the posting to this forum saying that we all use nav
lights and therefore the posts are relevant to this forum

36 to debate which method of changing nav lights is superior, where to buy the best nav lights, what brand of nav lights work best for this technique and what brands are faulty

7 to post URL's where one can see examples of different nav lights

4 to post that the URL's were posted incorrectly and then post the
corrected URL's

3 to post about links they found from the URL's that are relevant to
this group which makes nav lights relevant to this group

13 to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety including all
headers and signatures, and add "Me too"

5 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the nav light controversy

4 to say "didn't we go through this already a short time ago?"

13 to say "do a Google search on nav lights before posting questions about nav lights"

1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again.

1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 10 years from now and start it all over again :p

You nailed it Mightygem

That depends on whether you read what I actually wrote compared to what you think I implied......

Great post MG:ok:

Given the size of the fireball seen in the video when the F35B smacked the dirt suggests to me it had quite a bit of fuel on board....maybe he'd taken/was taking on some gas when things went pear shaped. That's an expensive smoking hole in the ground, not to mention what it's going to cost to cleanup that strawberry field which is now a HAZMAT site.

Back during my seafaring days, I was taught that the proper way to announce a dodgy situation was "Pan Pan" and to announce a real hairball emergency was "Mayday". When I learned to careen across the skies back in the 1960s, I was taught the same way: use "Pan Pan" and "Mayday" I don't know about the military, but my experience was in the civilian aviation environment. I never officially flew for the military.

Of course there could be a bit of Francophobism associated with reluctance to utter the phrase "Mayday", which is allegedly a shortened bastardization of the French phrase "M' aidez moi". On the other hand, Francophiles may object to the shortening/bastardization of any French phrase, considering that use of such a term constitutes an attack on all things French; consequently, such folks would be reluctant to participate in any way in the decline of the French Language by uttering the phrase "Mayday". :rolleyes: Je ne sais pas.

I have always preferred the use of the "Pan and Mayday" codes because they seem to be fairly precise in their meaning, plus they add a bit of "je ne sais quoi" to the whole aviation/maritime experience.

Cheers,
Grog

Circumstances sometimes roll the dice in your favour, sometimes not, procedures/rules are written in blood it is oft said. The Herc crew certainly did a an absolutely great job, no denying. Having already declared a PAN there is little doubt the controller knew what Swissair 111 meant when they used the word "Emergency".

1:14:18.0 Swissair one eleven heavy is declaring Pan Pan Pan. We have uh smoke in the cockpit, uh request (deviate), immediate return uh to a convenient place, I guess uh Boston ***
1:25:05.4 And we are declaring emergency now Swissair one eleven
1:25:49.3 End of recording

All 229 died.

The link I previously gave was an outcome of the Avianca 52 crash at JFK, a 707 in which eight of the nine crew members (including all three flight crew members) and 65 of the 149 passengers on board were killed. The NTSB determined that the crash occurred due to the flight crew failing to properly declare a fuel emergency, failure to use an airline operational control dispatch system, inadequate traffic flow management by the FAA, and the lack of standardized understandable terminology for pilots and controllers for minimum and emergency fuel states. The crew had asked for "Priority" which didn't really communicate the predicament they were in.

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/...ts/AAR9104.pdf

Yes, but it doesn't tell anyone the state you're in, just knocked the nav light off, wing came off your F-15 and managed to land OK, or you're ejecting. Should you need to eject just say "I'm ejecting", don't bother with all that MAYDAY nonsense. ;)

I guess we could adopt the attitude of the apocryphal story of a FJ type putting out a MAYDAY in Vietnam and being told in reply "Shut up and die like a man".Carrots a local says in one report, so should lower the cost.

I might say that to my GIB (if so equipped), otherwise, I'm pulling the "handles" and getting out. Let ATC figure it out. Of course, it is always best to transmit as much information to ATC (or whomever) prior to ejection ... if there's enough time.

By the way, I have no experience with ejection seat-equipped aircraft. I'm just a card-carrying coward, and as soon as the idea "eject" entered my brain, I'm outta there. I do, however, have a couple of friends who successfully ejected from stricken aircraft ... one from an F-105 at near M-1.

Cheers,
Grog

You forgot the
1 to post that there is no appostrophe in URLs

Not to mention the long time lurker, who jumps in to correct the spelling of "apostrophe"

El G.

Bet California doesn't allow that. There are specialists with kit to do this. You truck all the contaminated ground away to them, where a centrifuge-like machine heats it, mixes it with water, splits it into components, etc and deals with it all. Expensive machine, not used that much, so costs a lot when you do. Charged by the ton. Meanwhile, truck back in fresh soil. Old roadside fuel station sites invariably have petrol and diesel which has leaked from the tanks into the ground below and needs this before you build something else there.

Likewise never flown anything in which ejection is an option... However... I would imagine that in almost all cases, a 0.5-second call saying "Ejecting" would have a helicopter sent out to my location pretty quickly. If I am on the ground, in the middle of nowhere, with a broken leg.... I would not like to be thinking about whether or not the controller is still sitting at his chair trying to work out what was going on. Knowing the exact point of ejection would seriously reduce the search area, I guess.

I am purely guessing that the system as a whole might have an ELT, or the Military pilots might carry some sort of personal location device... however... If that hunch is right or wrong... a quick shout out couldn't do much harm....

... THinking further... in the circumstances of this thread... a quick shout of "Ejecting" allows the controller to focus more on the wounded Herc, as he isn't trying to work out what is happening with the other aircraft... the other aircraft is now isaac newton and the insurance company's problem