Maintainers at Fairchild AFB, Wash., noticed an issue with a KC-135 earlier this year and were able to stop it before it could have had a huge impact on the fleet. While working to fix a KC-135’s boom ruddervator torque tube, which secures the rudders that an operator uses to guide the boom during refueling, airmen with the 92nd Maintenance Squadron, discovered that the ruddervator’s bell crank was improperly installed. This could make the boom difficult to control and possibly risk the aircraft and the aircrews in them, according to a Fairchild news release. The airmen also noticed inaccurate wording in technical orders, which led to the incorrect installation, and submitted a correction to amend the technical orders for the entire KC-135 fleet to ensure that improper installation doesn’t happen again.
The future U.S. bomber force could provide a way for the Pentagon to simultaneously deter conflict with peer adversaries in two geographically disparate theaters, said Mark Gunzinger, the director of future concepts and capability assessments at AFA's Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, during a March 21 event. But doing so…