Iowa ANG Retires Patriotically Painted KC-135E Tanker

An elderly but beautifully preserved aircraft of the U.S. Air Force's Air Mobility Command is heading for retirement.

Operated until the last few days by the Iowa Air National Guard's 185^th Air Refueling Wing (ARW), based at Sioux City, IA, a 1950s-vintage Boeing KC-135E Stratotanker named The Patriot has been flown to Arizona.

There the U.S. Air Force plans to retire the aircraft, which the Air Force purchased new in 1957.

The KC-135E known as The Patriot has been widely photographed during the last few years because of the striking artwork painted on its forward fuselage. The practice of painting images on the forward fuselages of aircraft is commonly referred to as "nose art" by aviation historians and enthusiasts. The practice first became widespread during World War II.

In keeping with the aircraft's name, a montage of painted images on The Patriot's nose includes representations of the famous photograph of U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II; the four presidents' faces carved on Mount Rushmore, S.D.; a Space Shuttle lifting off; a statue of President George Washington; a U.S. flag; and details of a war memorial.

A flight crew from Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., flew the elderly KC-135E to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Ariz., home of the 309^th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG).

The 185^th ARW will replace all its remaining KC-135Es with re-engined KC-135Rs this year. The KC-135R (and its sibling the KC-135T) is a version of the original airframe that is re-engined with modern CFM56-2 turbofan engines in place of Pratt & Whitney TF-33-PW-102s.

Because of the advanced age of many KC-135 airframes--all were built from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s--even the TF33-PW-102 engine is not the KC-135's original powerplant.

It is, in fact, the same engine that powered the later examples of the commercial Boeing 707 that were built in the late 1960s and the 1970s. In 1981 the U.S. Air Force began buying hundreds of spare 707 engines. It refurbished them and installed them on 160 KC-135s to replace the tankers' original, smoky, noisy and inefficient J57-P-59W turbojet engines.

But even though the U.S. Air Force and its Air National Guard units replace all or most of the parts in their KC-135Es' TF33-PW-102 engines regularly and each KC-135 flies much less than do airliners in commercial service, the powerplant was designed more than 40 years ago.

In contrast, the version of the CFM56 engine powering the KC-135R was designed in the late 1970s and first flew in regular service in the 1980s.

The KC-135R is capable of offloading 50 percent more fuel than the unmodified KC-135E and is 25 per cent more fuel-efficient, according to the U.S. Air Force. Even more impressive is the 96 per cent reduction in engine noise that the re-engined version offers despite the fact that at 21,634 pounds of takeoff thrust each of the KC-135R's four CFM56 engines is some 20 per cent more powerful than the 18,000-pound-thrust TF-33-PW-102.

Boeing built 732 KC-135s for the U.S. Air Force. Of these, 410 have been re-engined with CFM56-2 powerplants. The Air Mobility Command's total inventory of KC-135s still numbers more than 490 aircraft, the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard units operating 271 of them.

The final destination of The Patriot, Davis-Monthan AFB's AMARG, is famous worldwide among aviation enthusiasts as the US Government's sole aircraft storage, reclamation and dismantling center.

More than 4,200 aircraft from all branches of the US Government are stored there in an area that covers thousands of acres of desert. Huge hangars for aircraft maintenance and warehouses for storage of aircraft parts occupy many additional acres.

Davis-Monthan AFB is particularly suitable for aircraft storage because of the very dry desert air found in southern Ariz, in which aircraft can be kept for many years without corroding.

Many of the aircraft in long-term storage at AMARG are preserved carefully with plastic sealant covering their engine intakes and other to allow future reactivation at short notice in the event of general hostilities, but most are gradually broken up for spares and metal recycling.

AMARG claims to recover up to $20 from sales of spares and metal for every dollar spent on running the center.

The enormous AMARG--until recently known as AMARC, the 'C' standing for 'Center'--became particularly well known when the SALT agreements resulted in the U.S.A. agreeing to dismantle 365 Boeing B-52 heavy bombers. The wings of each aircraft were sheared off and clearly displayed beside the broken-up fuselages so that Soviet satellites traveling far overhead could take photographs to verify the destruction of the B-52s.