Over the past couple of years, the U.S. Air Force has been rapidly growing its use of hot-pit refueling, a process that can cut ground time for military planes significantly by refueling them with their engines still running. Key to operations in austere and dispersed regions like the Pacific, this technique enables aircraft to make fast refueling and get back to the mission, sharply cutting down the normal hours it spends on the ground to just about an hour.
“What hot pit refueling does for us is it allows us to minimize our time on the ground. And with ACE doctrine, the whole point is to be agile. So we have more time to react to threats versus more time spent on the ground figuring out maintenance issues or having to gas up the jet in the standard procedure.” said one Air Force captain.
A team from Fairchild Air Force Base – nicknamed “America’s Super Tanker Wing” traveled to the Pacific to survey airfields for their ability to support hot-pit refueling for the KC-135. The survey team certified six new hot-pit refueling locations in the Pacific, including a historical first at Royal Australian Air Force Base Darwin.
“We were the first tanker to actually do hot-pit refueling in Australia in Air Force history,” said Captain Blake Kidd, chief of tactics for the 93rd Air Refueling Squadron.
The push by the Air Force to grow hot-pit refueling capabilities is an effort in line with the service’s Agile Combat Employment, or ACE, concept. ACE aims to make air combat forces more flexible and their forward deployments less predictable by flying planes from a far-reaching number of austere forward outposts—all serviced by a larger “hub” base.
“If we can be on the ground for a shorter amount of time, it’s less time for the enemy to target us,” Kidd said. “And we want to complicate that even more by increasing the number of airfields that we’re operating in.”
So far, approximately 45 locations have been certified to support hot-pit refueling, and the Air Force has also expanded the mission to include new airframes like the B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit bombers. The first refueling from a hot-pit by a KC-135 happened in 2020, with the first European and continental U.S. missions taking place in 2021.
The Fairchild team “is constantly looking for” new locations that can be certified to refuel hot pits, and is working to expand training on the procedure, both at the home station and downrange.
Across the vast and dispersed Pacific theater, extended flight time and the fewest possible aircraft needed to operate downrange are mission-critical for the Air Force. If ground time is reduced by hot-pit refueling, it increases the agility and responsiveness of its forces—a matter of making it hard for an adversary to target its forces.