Quoting from the article in the first post:
"The 2025 accident stands in direct contrast to the findings of a 2022 KC-46A boom accident investigation, which reached a notably different conclusion about where responsibility lay. In that earlier case, board president Colonel Chad Cisewski wrote that "a pattern begins to emerge which leads me to conclude that this FCS input by [the boom operator] was inadvertent and due to a limitation of the KC-46 [boom] control system," adding that "it is not a reasonable conclusion that [the boom operator] could have recognized his inadvertent input and corrected the situation with the current [boom] control deficiencies." The 2022 report blamed the aircraft. The 2024 and 2025 reports blamed the crews. The defect connecting all four accidents has been in the Air Force's own records throughout, classified at the highest level of severity, and it remains unresolved.
The Government Accountability Office, the independent congressional watchdog that audits federal programs, published a separate report just one week before the 2025 investigation became public that placed the KC-46A's problems in their full operational context, as Task & Purpose reported. The GAO found that as of February 2026, Air Force officials reported one critical deficiency related to the KC-46A's refueling boom, and that unit officials described additional problems including frequently failing electrical components on the boom, sensors that do not perform accurately, airframe cracks, and other structural issues. The tanker fleet, the GAO found, did not meet the Air Force's availability and capability standards from fiscal year 2019 through fiscal year 2025, six consecutive years in which American air power's logistical backbone fell short of its own requirements.
The practical consequence has been increasing dependence on the
KC-135, a tanker whose airframes are in some cases older than the grandparents of the pilots flying them."
The KC-135 has been operating very well for 60 years or more. All replacements have had issues.
Why are we stiil buying from Boeing, who seem in recent decades to be eternally serious f##kups on both design/engineering and production line levels? If somebody clearly cannot do the job, find an alternative suplier. It seems obvious to me...
Why do we need all this high tech and eternally more complex and trouble prone chicken shit when simple and robust successful solutions have existed for decades? Why is good enough never good enough for the US military??
It is always easy to blame the receiver pilot, but there have been low time pilots receiving fuel for many decades. This stuff is expectable and the old equioment seems to have generally handled poor pilots and wretched comditions just fine.
Tens of millions of dollars in damage and careers destroyed because of deficient design and execution by everybody involed is simply not acceptable in times like this' Our people need stuff that works, and they are not getting it at this point..
