In an interview with Reuters news service, new Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said that the Air Force may want to re-engine some of its current KC-135 tanker force, so the number of new tankers the service might buy may be lower than anticipated. (The Air Force currently has some 500 KC-135s.) He told Reuters, “I don’t want to mislead manufacturers to believe that there’s going to be this massive buy, then at the end of the day you only buy 10.” The notion of re-engining old tankers is not new; it’s been done. The problem—as we have reported here and here—is that a new engine does nothing to solve the old airframe corrosion problems.
Air Force Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost—a trailblazer and one of the first 10 women to reach a four-star rank across the U.S. military—retired and passed control of U.S. Transportation Command to Air Force Gen. Randall Reed on Oct. 4, finishing an eventful tenure at TRANSCOM.