US Military Aircraft Part 2 - Transports and Tankers

I've previously given a brief overview of the US military's fighters and bombers, and it is now time to follow that up with an examination of the large and unglamorous fleet of support aircraft.

Transports

Airplanes are generally the fastest way to move things around, and the military needs a lot of things moved quite fast. Sometimes these things are bombs, and we use the planes we talked about last time to deliver them to unwilling recipients. But sometimes, the thing is people or trucks or other equipment, and bombers are not well suited to carry these. So instead, the military turns to transports of various kinds. Some of these are basically civilian airplanes with a new paint scheme and some military radios, while others are bespoke airlifters, intended to deliver big cargoes that normal airliners can't handle, such as tanks or paratroopers, to places normal airliners can't go.

C-5 Galaxy

The C-5 is the largest of America's transport aircraft, a plane the size of a 747 that is designed to haul heavy cargo between continents. If you really need to airmail a couple tanks somewhere, this is what you'd pick. But even the mighty C-5 can only carry two and we only have about 50 in service, so it's really recommended that you send heavy armored units by sea instead. Other possible payloads include helicopters, trucks, troops or a small submarine. In theory it has the capability to land on primitive runways, although this has never been done in operation.

C-17 Globemaster III

The C-17 is the C-5's smaller brother, intended to be cheaper and better at operating near the front lines. In practice, the maximum payload isn't that different, making the C-17 the only other choice for airmail delivery of armored units, but the plane itself is significantly smaller, making it less great for oversized loads. The Air Force is slightly more willing to risk it in tactical use, making the 220-strong fleet the plane of choice if the 82nd Airborne has an urgent appointment on the other side of the globe. A number of other nations also bought C-17s before it went out of production about 10 years ago. Also, it once carried a whale.

C-130 Hercules

While the C-5 and C-17 are intended for strategic missions, the C-130 is America's standard for tactical airlift, flying troops and equipment around inside a combat theater. A typical example might carry 92 passengers or 20 tons of cargo, or 64 people willing to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and get shot at. The basic design dates back to the 1950s and has been exported to... basically everyone, but it has been updated a number of times and the current C-130J variant, with updated engines, propellers and avionics, remains in production today. It's not a particularly pleasant airplane to fly on, but it is great for working out of short, unpaved runways and it has been converted to a whole host of missions, from gunships to operating off of skis to support scientific missions in the polar regions, and some of which we'll come back to later. Also capable of landing on a carrier if the pilot is good.

C-2 Greyhound

The C-130 may be capable of a carrier landing, but it's big and tricky to do that with, so the aircraft of choice when you want to send something out to a carrier is the C-2 Greyhound. A cousin of the E-2 Hawkeye AWACS (of which more soon), the Greyhound has a tailhook and a couple are usually assigned to each carrier wing to ferry high-value cargo and passengers (and the occasional journalist) out when the ship is at sea.

V-22 Osprey

The V-22 Osprey is a tiltrotor, an attempt to combine the speed and range of a fixed-wing airplane with the ability of a helicopter to take off and land vertically. It's neither a very good airplane nor a very good helicopter, but it can actually do both jobs, giving some very useful capabilities. Its development was notoriously difficult, although surprisingly smooth by the standards of perfecting an entirely new category of aircraft. The Marines are the primary user of the type with the MV-22 (it would normally be CV-22, but someone was afraid of confusing that with an aircraft carrier, so the Air Force uses that designation for their Special Ops version instead) which is now their primary aircraft for moving people around, a role previously filled by helicopters. The Navy has also bought the CMV-22 (a designation that makes me want to stab the person responsible) because the C-2 couldn't carry an F-35 engine, and Japan has bought a few, too. Unfortunately, there have been more technical issues recently, and the entire fleet was grounded for three months in 2024 after a crash.

Civilian Aircraft

I'm not going to go into much detail on the civilian aircraft that various service branches operate, because they are doing the same basic job as the types you might see/fly on in daily life. These are usually used for ferrying around VIPs and high-value cargo, while large groups are usually moved on chartered airliners. Notable favorites include the C-12 Huron, the military version of the King Air turboprop, the C-40 Clipper, a Boeing 737 with a new paint job, and some militarized Gulfstreams (C-20, C-37) and Learjets (C-21). Slightly more interesting is the C-32, a military version of the 757. The C-32A is also known as Air Force Two, and is used by the Vice President and other important dignitaries, while the C-32B is unmarked and fitted for aerial refueling, with most other information kept classified. It's not even clear exactly how many there are in service.

Tankers

Airplanes can only carry a limited amount of fuel, and when that fuel runs out, they have an annoying tendency to crash. This limits range, which is something people planning military missions frequently want more of. So someone came up with the idea of adding more fuel while the plane is flying. This turned out to be extremely useful, and two main methods eventually emerged. In one, used by most of the world, the receiving aircraft has a probe that the pilot pushes into a basket on the end of a hose trailed by the tanker. And the tanker can be almost anything, with the Navy frequently using "buddy tanking" with one plane taking on fuel from another plane of the same type that has a hose reel in a pod. In other, used primarily by the US Air Force, an operator on the (dedicated) tanker flies a boom into a receptacle on the receiving aircraft. This method allows higher transfer rates, which is an important consideration when you have to refuel something like a B-52.

KC-135 Stratotanker

Another of the antiques of military aviation, the KC-135 has been around since the 50s. It is based on the original Boeing 367-80, which later developed into the 707 airliner. The 380 or so still in service have been extensively upgraded, most notably with new engines (a boon for anyone living under the flight path) and continue to provide the backbone of US aerial refueling capability today. Because filling the whole fuselage with fuel would make the plane impractically heavy, the KC-135 (and pretty much all tankers, actually) can carry passengers or small to medium cargo in the place an airliner would put its passengers.

KC-46 Pegasus

The KC-135 is getting rather old, and the Air Force has made several attempts to replace it, usually by getting Boeing to convert an airliner that wasn't designed using Roman numerals. Unfortunately, the first attempt fell victim to corruption, while Airbus somehow won the second time, forcing them to reopen the program so Boeing could win. Things didn't get better after the KC-46 was finalized, with a number of delays due to problems with the boom. It turns out that replacing "a guy laying on his belly looking out of a window" with a bunch of fancy 3D screens tends to cause technical problems. But they seem to have mostly been sorted out, and almost a hundred have been delivered at time of writing in late 2024, allowing the DC-10-derived KC-10 to be retired, along with some of the most arthritic KC-135s.

KC-130 Hercules

A Marine C-130 converted to do aerial refueling using probe-and-drogue. The most famous of the type is "Fat Albert", which supports the Blue Angels, although sadly they ran out of JATO bottles a number of years ago. The Marines have recently started hanging glide bombs and small missiles on their airplanes, making them cheap gunships as well as fully capable transports and tankers.

But sometimes the thing that needs to be moved around is not fuel or cargo or passengers, but information. Next time, we'll turn to command and control aircraft, as well as electronic warfare.