Boeing KC-46 - F-22 boom incident

[GTX]

Boeing KC-46 boom falls into Atlantic in second snap-off in a year

A known design flaw in the U.S. Air Force's newest and most expensive aerial refueling tanker has now contributed to four separate midair accidents since 2022, including two incidents where the aircraft's refueling boom, a 15-meter (50-foot) telescoping arm worth

defence-blog.com

 

[GTX]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjt6ZL8GzKQ

 

[DDonSS3]

Boeing's been making thinge booms since the 1940s and they can't get them to work right in the 2020s?

 

[Sabrejet]

This is the "the Air Force twice got the wrong aircraft" tanker? The one where the first bid "win" was fraudulent?

 

[GTX]

I tend to agree with Mover. It sounds more like the F-22 pilot was having a bad day and they should have called off the training.

 

[GTX]

Boeing's been making thinge booms since the 1940s and they can't get them to work right in the 2020s?

Where was that implied?

 

[GTX]

This is the "the Air Force twice got the wrong aircraft" tanker? The one where the first bid "win" was fraudulent?

No - Did you read the story/watch the video?

 

[Sisu]

Where was that implied?

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..

 

[pb43]

No - Did you read the story/watch the video?

Afraid it was. They picked the riskiest most expensive and least capable option TWICE