Salute to the Men and Women of 433rd Air Lift Wing, Kelly USA

Hi to all. I would like to thank the many involved in the Bosses Day at the 433rd Air Lift Wing at Kelly Airforce Base in San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A.. It is a time that will be remembered by many, many people that were given an inside view of what is done by the Air Force Reserves in supporting the many folks of the different branches of our Military forces. I would like to take this opportunity to share some photos of the ground ops and flight with a air refuel. It was my understanding that this is the 13th or 14th year for the Bosses day to happen.  I hope it can continue so that others can see what happens in the eyes of a Reservest.

I have done some editing that took some time to complete and have all them uploaded to the server now for your viewing.  I hope that you find this interesting. I understand that it would have been more interesting to have been there but this is all that I can do to show you what we experienced on the flight.  This page will take a little bit to download. Thanks, Clint

The Aircraft can hold 5 Apache helicopters in the caro hold area at one time or 3 Abrams tanks, all this with about 90 troops seated in the troop seating area in the upper deck along with 4 changes of flight crew.  This aircraft can fly 24 hours a day with a flight speed of around 500 mph.  Carrying 325,000 pounds of fuel in its 12 fuel tanks.  It received 20,000 pounds of fuel in 8 minutes when we refueled with the KC-135R model. It was stated that when refueling with a KC-10 it will refuel 20,000 pounds of fuel in 5 to 6 minutes. Talk about a fast pit stop with no time to check the tires. There is 28 tires on this baby and each weighs in at better than 4,500 lbs each. It has four TF-39 engines that produce 41,000 lbs of thrust so with 164,000 lbs of thrust you can feel the power when they push the throttles forward.

Here are the pictures. You can download any of the pictures that you want or link to my page. Some of the pictures are larger than what you are seeing. You can right click and open in a new window for full size pictures.

Here is a picture of the plane showing how large it really is. The pickup in the front of the airplane is the size of a normal sized ambulance with the box on the back.

Here is a nice picture of a C-130 next to a C5A and will help show the size of this plane. It make you wonder how it gets
off the ground.

Even after standing next to this giant its hard to get a hold of its size. Here is one of the nose with some of the support personel
by the nose wheel and one zoomed out.  Mind you that I am sitting in a full size school bus.

Here is the Pilot side.

Here is the Copilot side.

Here is the Flight Engineer.

Here is a good shot of the whole cockpit area.

Here is a panoramic picture from the top of the aircraft.

Here is a picture of the Cargo bay from the rear to the front. Nose is open.

If the cargo is on pallets, this is the unit used to load the aircraft.  It loads and weighs everything that comes on board so the
Load Master can calculate the CG (Center of Gravity) to make sure that the aircraft is safe to fly. If the cargo will roll on board, such as a tank or helicopter, they have a book that tells the weights so they can then make the calulations.

At this point we are off on our journey from Kelly, U.S.A. at San Antonio and flying to Monument Valley on the Arizona and Utah borders. During this flight we met up with a KC-135R model tanker on our way over to New Mexico. The tanker was flying at us until he was about 22 miles from us then turned into our flight path allowing us to come up from below for a drink. The last picture shows how close you really are while refueling.  You only have about 10 to 12 feet of movement on the boom so that the aircraft can move without causing a hazzard for either arcraft.

Here is what the ground looks like from 27,500 ft

On the picture below you can see how close the belly is of the KC-135R. Note: The C5A uses a lighted runway of sorts to dock for the refueling and can be seen on the belly toward the nose. It is the two black bars with the D, U, A and F on it with the yellow strip up the center. Here is what the letters stand for: D (down), U (up), A (aft) and F (forward). The pilot had to slow us down to almost match the KC-135R's speed while still having to overtake them a bit but yet match the speed of the KC-135R perfectly when we connected with the refuel nozzle while maintaining the distance between our aircraft within a 5 ft +/- the whole time. You could tell the stress level went way up during the refueling.

Here is a shot of the boomer. He is the refuel master. He really gets paid to lay around.  He is to the left of the boom, centered in the window.  He is wearing glasses and has a boom mic in front of his mouth.

Here are some pictures of the main wheels.  They call these trucks (they are almost the same size as one).

Here we are at the end of the flight.  We are setting up for landing now.  Flaps are coming down and heard the gear come down a minute ago. You can really feel the drag when the flaps and spoilers came on down for the landing.