Issue Date: August 23, 2004
Stratotankers’ fate
Service says it can’t afford repairs, so aircraft may sit idle if not retired
By Gordon Trowbridge
Times staff writer
Thirty of the Air Force’s oldest aerial tankers may sit unused later this fall if officials can’t convince Congress that the planes should be retired.
The 30 KC-135E Stratotankers need millions of dollars in repairs to replace corroded engine pylons — money the Air Force hadn’t planned to spend. Plans to retire the aging planes would have to be scuttled if key senators succeed in blocking those plans.
Gen. John Handy, commander of Air Mobility Command, described the issue to a group of Washington defense reporters in July.
“The quandary we’re in is we can’t retire them, but we can’t fly them after the first of October, and I don’t have the funds in my budget to fix them,” Handy said. “So what we’re going to do is perhaps ground those aircraft and just let them sit while we try to figure out what to do.”
The issue is corrosion of engine struts — the pylons connecting the KC-135E’s four Pratt & Whitney engines to its wings. Depot maintenance teams at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., have been repairing the problem, which affects all E-models, since 2001.
Handy said Air Force Materiel Command experts have told him they do not recommend flying the jets into fiscal 2005, which begins in October, unless they get the temporary repairs. Even that fix — about $12 million for all 30 jets — would keep the planes in the air for about five years, when a much more expensive permanent repair would be necessary, Handy said.
Those problems, Air Force officials say, are a big part of the reason they want to begin retiring KC-135Es, all of which belong to Air National Guard or Air Force Reserve units. But the Senate has had different ideas.
Last year, amid growing controversy over the Air Force’s plan to lease 100 Boeing airliners as replacements for the KC-135, senators succeeded in passing legislation that sharply cut the number of tankers the Air Force could retire this fiscal year.
The Senate version of the defense authorization bill for fiscal 2005 includes a ban on KC-135 retirements. The House version contains no such ban and would allow the service to go forward with 41 retirements beginning this fall, including the 30 planes not scheduled for engine strut repairs.
A conference committee is expected to begin work this fall on resolving differences between the two bills. If the Air Force can’t convince lawmakers to allow the retirements, it will have only itself to blame, said a vocal critic of the service’s tanker plans.
“They have cried wolf several times before, and so it’s going to be difficult for Congress to take them seriously this time,” said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, one of several watchdog groups that has attacked the Boeing tanker lease as wasteful.
“We all know these are old birds, and they need to be dealt with,” Ashdown said. “But to try and convince the public, and especially the Congress, through emergency anecdotes is probably going to fall on deaf ears. The service’s credibility on the Hill right now is low.”
Outside critics and lawmakers, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have accused the Air Force of refusing to provide reliable data on just how much danger corrosion presents to the KC-135 fleet. In rejecting the tanker lease idea last year, lawmakers ordered the Pentagon to submit a detailed study of KC-135 corrosion problems.
The continuing controversy has delayed Air Force plans to begin shuffling its tanker fleet in anticipation of receiving new tankers to replace the Eisenhower-era KC-135s.
Air Mobility Command has said the retirements would have little impact on overall tanker operations because higher crew-to-aircraft ratios would allow planners to fly the remaining tankers more often. An AMC spokesman said in a written statement that the command’s planners call on fewer than 20 reserve-component tankers a day, and that reserve units could fill those requirements without the 30 aircraft.
A decision on how to proceed isn’t expected until at least late fall, when the Pentagon is expected to complete an analysis of alternatives ordered earlier this year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. That order came after two Boeing executives, one a former Air Force acquisition official, were indicted. Darleen Druyun, the former Air Force official, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy for negotiating a job with Boeing without recusing herself from decisions involving the company.
Meanwhile, Air Force Reserve and National Guard tanker units, which own all the KC-135 E-models, continue to wait and hope that plans to retire their planes and replace them with more capable KC-135Rs will eventually take shape.