Reportedly Missing US Air Force Jet Lands Safely at British Base

Reportedly Missing US Air Force Jet Lands Safely at British Base

I didn't hear about this one at all.

It called out squawk 7700 and disappeared from radar.

however it then landed an hour later? Wouldn't a plane with an emergency condition land immediately?

Especially only 15 minutes from takeoff?

Was it refueling something at low altitude so it wouldn't be seen?

Any thoughts?

A US Air Force refuelling jet, the Boeing KC-135R Stratotanker has been reported as disappeared off the radar over the English Channel.

The jet left Amiens in northern France at 0.05am local time and was last reported by a flight tracking website to be flying between Dover and Calais.

Fifteen minutes after take-off, at 0.20am, the aircraft fell off the tracking website.

The jet however landed an hour later at RAF Mildenhall, the Royal Air Force station located near Mildenhall in Suffolk.

Read more: sputniknews.com...

A defector. Damn Brits giving assylum to our pilots. I bet they even told him where the best Pubs were.

a reply to: rickymouse

Look at the map above he was all over the place!!.

a reply to: grey580

He couldn't land right away. He was too heavy. Their only option would be to dump fuel through the boom, or stay in the air long enough to burn some off. Either way it would take time.

Well he wasn't airborne for a terrible length of time altogether, 1hr and 15ms, and it's a short throw from Amiens back to his base at Mildenhall, maybe it was some electronic fault. I'm guessing though that he may still have been visible on primary radars. All the map shows is up to the point he went off tracking, a heading for England,then a dog leg to the right at the French coastline.

It was an electrical failure. They had to shut a lot of things down.

a reply to: grey580

You don't squawk 7700 when you're going to refuel something. All they'd have to do is go VFR/MARSA and drop off flight following. You don't ever mess around with 7700.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: grey580

He couldn't land right away. He was too heavy. Their only option would be to dump fuel through the boom, or stay in the air long enough to burn some off. Either way it would take time.

Ah! I get you, so it wasn't just returning to base then?

a reply to: smurfy

Not directly no. They'd be risking serious damage to the aircraft if they landed over weight. They'd do some troubleshooting of the problem, as well as burning off some fuel weight.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: smurfy

Not directly no. They'd be risking serious damage to the aircraft if they landed over weight. They'd do some troubleshooting of the problem, as well as burning off some fuel weight.

No, I meant that they weren't doing a short hop from Amiens then...meaning that the Amiens point of departure is rubbish.

a reply to: smurfy

Oh, I haven't conformed his mission yet, but tankers are frequently used to move cargo around which means even for short hops they'll take off heavy. If they were moving a fighter unit for example, at least one of the tankers would carry spare engines, toolkits, parts and pieces, etc.

Or he could have been meeting a C-5 or C-17 over the channel on the way back home.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: smurfy

Oh, I haven't conformed his mission yet, but tankers are frequently used to move cargo around which means even for short hops they'll take off heavy. If they were moving a fighter unit for example, at least one of the tankers would carry spare engines, toolkits, parts and pieces, etc.

Not from Amiens.

a reply to: smurfy

And they may have stopped there on the way from somewhere else, heading home. If they ran out of Duty Day they would have had to stop somewhere for crew rest before they could finish the flight.

How you can miss a KC-135 on one of the most guarded airspace in the world?.

a reply to: drwire

Radar only sees so far. And only primary radar sees a return from the aircraft itself.

a reply to: grey580

I was wonder if perhaps it "disappeared" because it was dumping fuel? The dispersing loud of fuel could have blocked or partially blocked radar returns?

a reply to: Aliensun

It was an electrical problem. They had to shut a bunch of systems down including transponder. Once that was off they were lost to radar until they got within range of a primary antenna.

a reply to: Zaphod58
Sounds like they had a bus drop off. I wonder if it was a generator failure? I would have figured they could tie remaining buses together but I really dont know with 135/707. Nearest I deal with is 737 which would be presumably similar.

LEE.

a reply to: thebozeian

They're about to find out that there's a problem with the new PCUs they switched to a few years ago. It's rumored that the bus failure was related to a rudder problem.