The new (official) AF1 will not have inflight refuelling capability.
Get the Marx Brothers to fly it. When they ran out of fuel halfway over the Atlantic, they just turned around to get more. And then they got twice as much gas but ran out three feet short, they also just turned around to get more. Night at the Opera
Do you mean the Qatari plane or the new ones still being built? By using the parenthetical, I assume you mean the latter.
The ones still being built.
Right, the two new VC-25B aircraft that are going to be the new Air Force One planes are being converted from two existing Boeing 747-8 airframes that had been built for a commercial airline but never delivered after the airline went bankrupt. It was decided that it would be too difficult to tear apart the nose of the aircraft to install in-flight refueling capability.
Also, modern jet engines are much more efficient than ones in the older aircraft, and the current VC-25A aircraft have never once done an in-flight refueling with the President on board because it’s one of the most dangerous operations one of these planes can do.
(BTW, it was thought that it would be a cost- and time-saving measure to start with two aircraft that were originally built for a Russian airline that went bankrupt and were subsequently mothballed in the desert. That has turned out not to be the case. The aircraft basically had to be disassembled and rebuilt. The delivery timeline has stretched out by years—from 2024 to 2028 or even later—and the price has doubled to over $6B for the two planes.)
I thought the refueling was so the ‘Flying White House’ could stay in the air indefinitely.
You can’t change the oil in flight, so you can only stay up for a limited time even with refueling.
Well sure, it needs maintenance, But fuel and food come first.
Our nuc subs are limited by how much food they can carry.
Or until something critical breaks that can’t be repaired on board.
Nope. You’re probably conflating Air Force One with the Looking Glass and TACAMO aircraft (which is a common mistake).
Oh, OK. Thanks.
Or also the NAOC (formerly NEACP).
Somewhat more on-point, since the E4-B, like the VC-25A, is based on an old 747 airframe (-200).
I think the E-4C, which is also being converted from second-hand 747-8s, will continue to have the ability to refuel.
It seems like the 747 is still the go-to airframe for anything that needs to carry a large unspecified payload that stays on the aircraft. Now that 747s are going out of service, is anyone making similar modifications to Airbus 380s, or any other large plane?
I know that there are a few larger military planes, but from what I’ve heard, they all have very low reliability.
The reason, which has been proven over and over again for years, is that he can do whatever he wants. I actually think the real possibility exists that, if he suddenly flipped out completely and nuked Tehran, he would still escape impreachment. We would have a president with an Interpol Red Notice.
Can’t be repaired on board seems to be fairly rare. On my last boat, a large pump motor burned out, and one of the officers in Engineering drafted an EM (Electrcian’s Mate) to assist with rewinding a stator coil. They finished it within a couple of days, dipped it in resin, cured it, and had it back on line in less than a week.
The US Air Force has been quite reticent to base a mission aircraft on a non-US airframe, for a variety of reasons (e.g., “national security”, “domestic supply chain”, “indigenous pork barrel”).
I’d say it heavily depends on how old and/or well-maintained the boat is. And what breaks, of course.
Nice job! That’s impressive you had the expertise and materials onboard to do this.
We had a short in the windings of an ASW (auxiliary seawater) pump, but because we were in port, we just replaced it. (Discovered a ground on a Saturday morning, and were torching interfering metal grating and removing the pump within an hour.)
At sea, we once lost an ESGN inertial navigation unit. Totally unrepairable at sea. Fortunately, there are backups, but with only two operational units, you don’t know which one is right if they disagree. Anyway, they flew a replacement unit out to meet us at an overseas port a few weeks later.
One thing we did repair at sea was one of the SSMG units that went down. (The ship’s service motor generator converts AC to DC and vice versa.)
I’m sure that, if they had been in port at the time, they’d have swapped in a new one. But there’s a sort of critical economy of scale, where it makes more sense to include the machinery that can make (almost) anything, than it does to carry individual spare parts.
Of course, a ship, even a submarine, is a lot bigger than any airplane, so there’s room to include make-anything equipment. A ship also has the ability to go mostly idle while out at sea for an extended time, if that’s necessary to make repairs: Unless there’s serious hull damage, it’ll just float. But the things that make an airplane fly absolutely have to keep on working, or you’re not flying any more.
