I had the good fortune to be able to spend a day with 101 Sqn of the Royal Air Force when they were undertaking training missions in one of their primary roles of aerial refuelling. Based at RAF Brize Norton, the squadron operates the Airbus Voyager, the A330MRTT aircraft. The aircraft we were in was configured for two-point refuelling while some of the aircraft have a three-point config that allows tanking of heavy aircraft from the higher capacity centreline hose drum unit.
We took off from Brize and headed out over the North Sea. Our initial tracks were off the coast of East Anglia which made for a convenient place to pick up trade from the RAF bases there. The F-35s were deployed from Marham so there was less likelihood of one of those jets showing up, but we did expect Typhoons. It was too long after we were on station before the first customers showed up.
The jets appeared from the port side of the jet and picking them up early allowed you to see them sweeping in astern of the plane before they approached from astern. They would gather off the port wing extending the refuelling probe before being cleared into pre-contact positions on either wing. Then they would pull forward to make contact and take on fuel. Once they were done, they would gather off the starboard wing until the flight had all taken on fuel at which point they would accelerate away to continue with their flight. This departure might just be peeling away but it sometimes included a burst of power and a climb up away from our flight level with the noise even being noticeable inside our insulated cabin.
There are very limited options when it comes to photographing the jets while they are plugged in. The pods are mounted outboard on the wings – I think in the location where the outboard engines would be on an A340 – but the length of the hose means that the drogue is quite a long way aft. This means that only the last few rows of the aircraft – it has a pretty standard seating config throughout most of the fuselage – actually have the ability to see the jets. I had been advised by a friend that the viewing was limited.
I had brought two cameras on the flight. My main camera was fitted with the 100-400 lens and my use for that was on aircraft off to either side. The other body I brought along was an older one I use less frequently these days and that is the M6 with a 55-200 lens. This ended up getting a lot of use. However, neither of them was suitable for use when the jets were refuelling. The angles looking back are tight and the interior panelling around the window apertures limits how you can point backwards. In this case, the phone was by far the best option. The small lens diameter combined with the ability to get it close to the window meant it was the best bet. Even then, it was limited in what it could see.
Later in the mission we headed up towards Scotland to pick up some local trade although, ironically, we ended up with jets from Coningsby which would probably have been fine in our original tracks. Overall, the mission last over 6 hours and we had a variety of periods when we had customers and then periods of waiting. It was definitely an interesting day out and certainly worth seeing. My thanks to the team at Brize for hosting us so well.
Go back a long time and I find myself at Red Flag at Nellis AFB and in the fortunate position of being able to take a tanker ride to refuel some of the participants. I won’t go into the details of the flight itself since that is a tale of its own. Instead, I will focus on some F-16s. Most Red Flag exercises seem to include participation by Shaw AFB F-16s. They operate in the Wild Weasel role, and I guess there aren’t many SEAD units, so they get to come most of the time.
Red Flag media events were always a guessing game as to what would be allowable to photograph. Sometimes the Shaw jets were in and sometimes they were out. Sometimes you would only find out afterwards that they were out. On our tanker trip we had F-22s and Shaw F-16s. It wasn’t clear whether they would be allowed or not.
In the end, we shot the planes as they came up for fuel and the USAF team then took all of our cards to decide what we could have and what we couldn’t. This could involve things on the ground that couldn’t be photographed that we had accidentally caught as well as the planes themselves. In this case, the Shaw Vipers were okay, so our cards came back with them included (or at least most of them with some deletions along the way. Here are some of the shots from that day.
