Effects of KC-10 Divestment on Daily Competition Sortie Requirements

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Effects of KC-10 Divestment on Daily Competition Sortie Requirements

A. A. Borszich

This project sought to find new ways of measuring the capacity and capability of the air refueling fleet in ways that can relate the needs of the Air Force to decision-makers that control DOD fiscal programming. Initial research could not find a usable history of refueling missions flown and how much fuel the tanker aircraft offloaded to receiver aircraft. Consequently, the logical start was to find data that could create such a record and demonstrate the utility of the information. The research used ten years of actual missions flown other than combat and a separate data set of fuel usage on over half of those missions to create a record of refueling mission effects. Then the database was analyzed to assess how many additional flights would be required if the original aircraft, the KC-10, was replaced with a smaller but more numerous KC-46. The research found that the historical schedule would have needed about 20 more flights flown by the KC-46 each year, but the claim on the required fleet size required to accomplish the increase was less certain.