What it’s like to refuel at 39,000 feet

It’s a spectacular view from the glass window under a KC-135 Stratotanker.

The brown, craggy terrain of the Rockies, bluish rivers and the green of trees seem so close, and then a massive B-52 bomber comes into view, flying directly at you.

Sure, your enjoyment of the view is hampered slightly by the fact that you’re lying flat on your stomach and you have about a foot of room on any side, but it’s still awe-inspiring to see such power gliding through the sky, seemingly effortlessly.

For the airmen at McConnell Air Force Base, that feeling is commonplace, as McConnell performs the most KC-135 refueling missions in the Air Force.

“The first time you open it – I can’t even describe it,” said Senior Airman Jesse Adams, a boom operator on the KC-135. “It’s beautiful flying over mountain ranges, oceans, different landscapes. It can be absolutely beautiful, and then getting other aircraft there coming right at your face, it can be horrifying at times and sometimes it can be ... I guess you could say, majestic.

“It’s hard to get tired of it, man. It’s really hard to get tired of it.”

Sixty years ago Wednesday, on Aug. 31, 1956, the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker made its maiden voyage.

Sixty years later, the KC-135 still serves a daily mission for the Air Force, though in the coming years, those pilots will be flying a new tanker.

The Air Force’s next generation of aerial refueling tankers, the KC-46, is scheduled to start arriving at McConnell by August 2017.

While the KC-135 will not officially be retired until 2040, soon many missions at McConnell will be flown on the KC-46 tankers. Some missions will still be flown with the old KC-135s.

McConnell, which is known for its KC-135 mission, has been preparing for the 60th anniversary of the plane for about a year.

A ceremony on Wednesday morning will officially commemorate the first flight, though the base took six local media members on a “media flight” on Tuesday to demonstrate the KC-135’s refueling power and the role it still serves in the Air Force.

The flight

We boarded the KC-135 at around 9:15 a.m., about three hours after we met at McConnell on Tuesday morning.

The interior of the plane, despite the 85-degree weather outside, felt more like 100 degrees.

Quickly, though, the interior chilled after climbing to 38,000 feet above sea level, and soon we were hunched over, trying to stay warm.

We headed west for the Rocky Mountains, where we were due to meet the B-52 Stratofortress, which was doing training exercises on Tuesday.

Soon enough, the massive plane hooked onto the KC-135 as we descended to about 25,000 feet to meet it, and it started accepting fuel from the KC-135 somewhere around Denver.

A little less than an hour later, the B-52’s tanks were full, and we found ourselves somewhere over northeastern Utah.

In the cockpit, Capt. Robert Pendergest and 1st Lt. Allison Smith began a gradual climb back to 39,000 feet, flying at approximately 287 mph comfortably above the clouds and all life below.

Pendergest and Smith deftly handled the decades-old controls, then silently laughed at the reporter in the cockpit, who must have appeared awestruck by their command of the metal knobs, blinking buttons and glass dials.

For them, this is nothing special – business as usual.

Waking up at 5 a.m. to fly this mission?

Standard operating procedure.

Soon we turned to the southeast, bound for Texas, where we were to encounter and refuel six F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets based out of Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. An hour and a half later, we had a rendezvous with the planes.

While the F-16s flew in formation around us, the KC-135 refueled each, giving them enough gas to perform aerial “dogfighting” exercises over Texas and New Mexico.

Forty-five minutes later, after ending up in New Mexico, the mission of the day was complete, and we headed for home, climbing 12,000 feet in a matter of seconds, shifting any unsecured items toward the rear of the plane.

The plane landed at McConnell shortly before 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, with the “low fuel” light blinking, the 5.5-hour flight – longer than usual – completed.

History of the KC-135

Sixty years ago, the first Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker, nicknamed “City of Renton” – a nod to Renton, Wash., where the plane was manufactured – took off for the first time. Test pilots Alvin “Tex” Johnson and Richard “Dix” Loesch flew the plane.

Boeing eventually went on to produce 803 KC-135 Stratotankers – more than 400 of which are still in service with the Air Force.

That first KC-135 was retired after more than 40 years of service in the Air Force and currently sits on display near the east gate at McConnell, symbolizing the base’s importance in the global refueling mission.

It’s not uncommon to hear of current KC-135 pilots who have parents or even grandparents who also flew the plane back in Vietnam or other conflicts.

Smith, who co-piloted the KC-135 on Tuesday, said she loves flying the KC-135 and did not apply to be a pilot on the new tanker for that reason.

“It’s a lot of fun flying a 135,” she said after Tuesday’s flight. “It’s incredible to think about a jet, or several jets, that have been flying for over 60 years and how well they were built in the first place to be able to keep flying the mission for that many years. It’s one of the oldest jets in the fleet, and it’s still doing great. It’s also a testament to the maintainers for being able to keep it up and flying for so long.”

The 22nd Air Refueling Wing at McConnell is the largest wing flying KC-135s in the Air Force, so any anniversary of the plane is celebrated on base.

The 60th anniversary, though, is taking on a special meaning at McConnell. It’s not necessarily a “goodbye” to the KC-135 so much as it is a look at all the KC-135 has helped to accomplish for the Air Force.

McConnell hosts 59 KC-135 tankers, and it is scheduled to receive 36 KC-46s, the next-generation Boeing tanker that will eventually phase out the KC-135 in 2040.

It will be the first active-duty-led base in the country to receive the new tankers when they start coming in 2017.

The arrival of the new tankers has been much heralded on base and in the Wichita community, as they have been seen as a stabilizing asset for McConnell in the Air Force’s larger plans. Before McConnell was announced as the base to receive the planes in 2013, there was concern about the future of McConnell amid widespread cuts in the Department of Defense.

Since the new planes have been announced, though, McConnell has taken on a leading role in one of the Air Force’s largest current projects – so much so that Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James visited the base for the first time last month, calling it “a key location for us.”

“Any time that there’s growth, any time that there is new equipment coming down the line – new technology – that always is a great morale booster to our airmen, and I think it’s true that McConnell is not only today but is going to remain a very key location for the United States Air Force,” James said during a news conference on base in July.

For many years to come, the KC-135 will still serve an important role at McConnell, though it’s unclear as to whether the number of KC-135s on base will be decreased as the KC-46 tankers start arriving.

“It’s special flying the same boom, if you will, that people 40 years ago flew,” said the 23-year-old Adams, the boom operator on Tuesday’s flight. “You kind of get a tough skin and you kind of grow to be with this airplane. It’s the one and only airframe I’ve ever flown on for the Air Force. When it goes away, it’s going to be a tough day.

“It’s going to absolutely be a tough day.”

This story was originally published August 30, 2016 at 6:56 PM with the headline "What it’s like to refuel at 39,000 feet."