Air Tanker are progressing bringing the RAF’s Voyagers into service and as can be sen from the images below have also offloaded fuel to French Rafale and US Navy F18’s [tabs] [tab title=”Rafale”] [/tab] [tab title=”F18″] [/tab] [/tabs] This is…
The RAF’s A330 Voyager airborne refuelling and transport aircraft, as we all know, are not owned by the RAF but instead provided by the Airtanker Consortium comprising Babcock, Cobham, Airbus Group, Rolls Royce and Thales as what is I suppose, a…
After 30 years of service the Tristar is now out of service with the RAF The final sortie was on the 24th of March and 216 Squadron disbanded. The Tristar fleet consisted of three sub types. 3x C.2 transport only,…
As the meritous, 50 year, service of the RAF VC-10 draws to a close, the last two aircraft (ZA147 and ZA150) will conduct their final air-to-air refuelling sortie, then diverge to carry out fly pasts of various locations around the…
I have covered the Future Strategic Tanker programme several times (the main one being here) on Think Defence including the oft held assertion that Air Tanker have some sort of monopoly on air to air refueling for the UK that…
We were discussing earlier this week the UK’s capacity to move personnel in and out ouf Afghanistan, whether the hub and spoke arrangement currently used with a mixture of RAF aircraft equipped with suitable DAS and civilian charters is necessarily the…
Announced this week was the official naming ceremony of the RAF’s newest and largest aircraft, the Voyager On the 15th of July the MoD wrote The RAF’s largest ever aircraft has been officially named Voyager after being flown by an…
The UK is continuing with Future strategic Aircraft Tanker (FSTA) programme that is being fulfilled as a PFI contract with Airtanker, a consortium consisting of Cobham, EADS, Rolls-Royce, Thales UK and VT Group. Over 27 years the company will provide…
The Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft or FSTA is the RAF’s new tanker and strategic transport aircraft based on the Airbus A330-200 aircraft. The 14 aircraft will replace the existing and rather knackered Tristar’s and VC10’s that are valiantly soldiering on…
