Pentagon spokesman John Kirby expressed his excitement and admiration over the skills of US military pilots involved in the mid-air refuelling of a Boeing E-4B airborne command post aircraft, posting a short video of the procedure on Twitter.
Kirby did not attribute the video or specify where the refuel took place, and whether it was a recent or archival footage. However, flight trackers reported Monday that four KC-135s had taken off from Yokota Airbase in Japan early Monday to refuel one E-4B and a second unidentified plane over the western Pacific. It takes two fully topped up KC-135s to refuel a single E-4B.
The E-4B is designed to evacuate America’s civilian leadership and Pentagon top brass in the event of a nuclear war and the destruction of ground and satellite communications. The US Air Force has four E-4Bs in its inventory, with the plane design first introduced in the mid-1970s and upgraded repeatedly since that time.
Over two dozen nations have mid-air refuelling capable aircraft in their inventory. However, only a handful of aircraft manufacturers, including the US’s Boeing, Europe’s Airbus and Russia’s Ilyushin, have the technical capability to build tankers.