The drive description

Good summary and the best case scenario of some bent (expensive) metal and some good stories - Heck of a job by the Marine C-130 crew putting it into a farm field with two engines out.

The ATC Audio download is worth listening to. (Link in story)

There goes one of those brand new expensive F 35s already....

Excellent work by the 130 crew

Good report, glad to hear all are intact.

Geeze, all this talk about skill, night traps on a pitching deck when ya can't hit a tanker... without physical hitting the tanker. 😬😁

Gald to hear everyone made it down safely.

Marines..... It's why the Department of the Navy can't have nice things.

They better take them gucci birds away from them before they scratch em all up... 🤣

So whose fault wa it. Who gets fired for destroying the $750,000 F35.

I think you need to add a couple zeros... and then double it...

Someone had a big set of stones and ice water in their veins all at the same time. Looking at the picture of the KC-130 just sitting in the field on its belly like it just taxied there. Impressive. Hats off. Glad all survived...

All kinds of interesting stuff happens around the tanker. I've been scared more around them than around the carrier.

Cokes still a nickel in your world?

Oops. $750,000,000, not $750,000.

And good job landing the crippled C130.

But who gets fired?

The problem is that you have a propjet refueling plane trying to go as fast as possible in order to "formate" with a jet going as slow as possible - and then tie the two together. It is not a good combination.

We will all learn what happened here - eventually. But in my mind, it's two very dissimilar aircraft trying to occupy the same piece of air at the same time.

100 million dollar mistake. At least everyone survived.

The J model Herk is pretty new too.

My son flies the AF MC-130J and he is very impressed with its capabilities. He transitioned to it form the KC-135 tanker and he says the job is much more interesting in the 130J.

Military aviation is inherently dangerous when everything is working right, and things can go south in the blink of an eye. Reminds me of the old adage "If you aren't terrified , you dont understand the situation". Glad everyone got out OK, some great flying by the C-130 crew.

I'll just leave this right here... 🙄 🤭

The Marines have done it for years and do it often so they're good at it but the couple times I tanked off a KC-130 it was sporty. We usually put the gear and flaps down at 200 knots. IIRC we tanked off the KC-130 at about 220 kts. As the jet gets heavier taking on usually about 15,000 lbs of fuel, and the angle of attack increased and you entered pre-stall buffet it got very sloppy on the controls. We'd then extend the flaps and slats and as soon as the flaps moved back pull the flaps/slats circuit breaker. That gave us a little more wing area and made the last couple 1000 lbs a lot more comfortable.

I was a jarhead. Good might be a bit of a exaggeration, I got to where I tolerated it but never did like tanking off them. They're going as fast as they can go while you're about to fall out of the sky and the controls are real mushy. The old KC-130's they had out of Cherry Point (can't remember what model) had crappy hose reel mechanisms and you'd often get a dead hose. It wasn't uncommon for you to plug and see the sine wave go up the hose, no way to get out in time before the sine wave came back and ripped off the probe. I plugged on the left hose one day and my wingman plugged on the right, I looked over at him just in time to see the wave in his hose and about two seconds later it snapped back taking his probe off and flinging it between his vertical stabs. We were done for the day!

The Brits had an L-1011 they'd converted to a tanker. I used to call it the Battlestar Galactica. It was lit up like a Christmas tree and at night you could see it before you could find it on radar. That thing was a dream to tank from.

The Brits also had the VC-10 - Another easy platform to tank off of. This pic is my wingman over eastern Turkey on our way into Iraq. I did tank off an RAF Victor a couple times too during Desert Storm. I wish I had a picture of it. Looks like it was designed by Jules Verne.

I had pretty good "hands" in general and loved close formation flying, but I'm darn glad I never had to learn refueling.

Good one-----I know from experience