Two years ago the last of them flew into the Arizona desert. Crews delivering the jets to the boneyard signed their names on the nose-gear doors and walked away. Now the US Air Force is asking who could make some of them fly again.

On 7 October 2026 a notice appeared on SAM.gov, the federal contracting portal, looking for companies able to regenerate up to four KC-10 Extender tankers from storage at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and hand them to a foreign air force. The customer is described only as “a partner nation in North Africa.”

It is a market-research request, not a contract, and nothing about it is settled. But it is the first concrete sign that the three-engined tanker the Air Force retired in 2024 may have a second career, and the list of plausible buyers is very short.

What the Air Force actually asked for

The notice, posted by the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center with a place of performance at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, is unusually specific about the work and unusually quiet about the customer. Its headline frames the job as a Foreign Military Sales programme for the “Purchase of Four Air Refueling Aircraft,” with a three-to-five-year sustainment package, contractor logistics support and training.

The body text spells out the whole chain, from desert to delivery. Whoever wins would have to drag the jets out of storage, get each one cleared for a single ferry flight, bring it back to full serviceability at depot level, fly it to the customer anywhere in the world, and then keep it running in the partner’s own country while training its crews and maintainers.

The detailed requirements are restricted: the notice says the full RFI contains Controlled Unclassified Information and will only be released to companies that email in with a CAGE code. Responses are due on 28 October. Answers “are not offers,” the Air Force stresses, and the request “does not constitute a Request for Proposal.”

The Excess Defense Articles route matters. It is the Pentagon’s mechanism for passing surplus equipment to partners, often at a reduced price or none at all, which would make the bill mostly about refurbishment, delivery and support rather than the airframes themselves. The State Department referred TWZ, which first reported the notice on 8 October, to the Pentagon for comment.

Why the KC-10 Extender is worth the trouble

The KC-10 is a militarised DC-10, and it was always more than a tanker. McDonnell Douglas built 60 for the Air Force; the first flew in July 1980 and the type entered service in 1981. Its three GE CF6-50C2 engines lift up to 356,000 lb of fuel, and it can haul almost as much cargo as a C-17, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Its real trick was carrying both refuelling systems at once. A flying boom serves receptacle-equipped jets such as the F-16, while a centreline hose-and-drogue unit serves probe-equipped aircraft. One KC-10 could serve both kinds of receiver on a single sortie, and it carried nearly twice the fuel of the older KC-135.

Crews loved it. At the final retirement ceremony at Travis Air Force Base, Lt. Col. Andrew Baer, commander of the 9th Air Refueling Squadron, described what that meant for fighters running out of fuel while supporting troops in contact.

The Air Force retired the fleet anyway, and its former KC-10 squadrons moved on to the KC-46 Pegasus. The first KC-10 went to the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, the boneyard, in July 2020. The last flew from Travis to Arizona on 26 September 2024, tail number 79-1948, call sign “Gucci 10.”

What is left in the desert

Of the 60 built, one was destroyed in a fire during ground maintenance at Barksdale in 1987. Not all of the survivors are candidates. In 2025 the government put ten KC-10s up for auction as non-flyable airframes, most missing an engine and all of them without their booms, which had been pulled for spares.

The condition of the rest is less clear. TWZ notes that the Fiscal Year 2026 defence authorisation act, signed in December 2025, ordered the Air Force to keep its remaining retired KC-10s in the same storage condition they were in on 30 September 2025, while still allowing disposal under existing property rules.

Bringing a widebody back from long-term storage is a well-trodden path at Davis-Monthan, but it is not quick or cheap. A one-time flight clearance only gets the jet airborne once; the depot work the notice describes is what turns it back into a tanker.

AiirSource Military’s compilation shows a KC-10 refuelling F-16s, A-10s and another KC-10 with its boom: the capability a North African F-16 operator would be buying.

Egypt or Morocco?

The Air Force does not name the country. TWZ’s analysis points to Egypt and Morocco as the most likely candidates, and the case for each rests on the same fact: both fly large F-16 fleets, and an F-16 refuels by boom.

Egypt has no aerial refuelling aircraft of its own. That gap was on display at the Eagles of Civilization 2026 exercise, when a Chinese YY-20 tanker refuelled an Egyptian Rafale in what was reported as the first publicly documented Chinese refuelling of a Western-built fighter. But the YY-20 uses probe and drogue, which suits Egypt’s Rafales and MiG-29s. It cannot refuel Egypt’s F-16s. A KC-10 can, and Egyptian F-16 pilots practised refuelling behind USAF Extenders during Exercise Bright Star 23.

Morocco is the other strong fit. Its air force flies F-16s and is buying more, and its first new F-16 Block 72 flew at Greenville, South Carolina, this month. Its own tankers are KC-130H Hercules with probe-and-drogue pods, and it has never operated a boom tanker. Moroccan F-16 pilots have practised dry boom contacts with Ohio Air National Guard KC-135s during African Lion 2025, and Morocco has chosen Embraer’s C-390 to replace its Hercules fleet, a type that refuels from wing-mounted hose-and-drogue pods.

Neither government has commented, and the notice could yet lead nowhere. But it is hard to read “four tankers, boom-capable, North Africa” without seeing an F-16 operator that wants to fly further without asking anyone else for fuel.

Not the first second life

The DC-10 tanker already has a civilian afterlife. The Royal Netherlands Air Force flew two KDC-10 conversions until 2021 and sold both to Omega Aerial Refueling Services, which leases tanker support to air forces, including the US military. The North African deal, if it happens, would put ex-USAF Extenders into a foreign air force’s own markings.

Forty-six years after its first flight, the Extender is not done passing gas.

Sources: SAM.gov notice 568b696058334b71a03aa084a5388d70 (FA8625-27-R-B001), 7 October 2026; TWZ (Joseph Trevithick), 8 October 2026, and TWZ on the 2025 KC-10 auction; Air & Space Forces Magazine (David Roza), 26 September 2024; National Museum of the US Air Force KC-10A fact sheet; Wikipedia, McDonnell Douglas KC-10 Extender; The Aviationist and AeroTime on Eagles of Civilization 2026; DVIDS (Bright Star 23, African Lion 2025, 9th ARS retirement imagery); Hespress, 21 August 2025; Wikipedia, Embraer C-390 Millennium.