“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! We’ve been struck by a missile.”

The call came over the radio late in the Vietnam War, as a KC-135 Stratotanker crew was finishing a refuelling mission over Southeast Asia and getting ready to turn for home. On the other end was an F-111 with two men aboard, hit by a missile and losing fuel fast.

What the tanker crew did next is one of the stranger rescues of the air war: they plugged the boom into the crippled jet, locked it there, and dragged it back to Thailand while pumping fuel into it the whole way.

The story is making the rounds again through a post by @theaviationcircle. It comes from an interview the US Air Force recorded with the tanker’s navigator, retired Major Jim Hickman, and the core of it is well sourced. A few details have drifted in the retelling.

“Let’s Go Get Him”

Hickman told the 22nd Air Refueling Wing’s public affairs office in 2015 that the crew exchanged glances and weighed their options when the Mayday came in. He made the call: “Let’s go get him.” The tanker confirmed the fighter’s position over the radio and headed north until the two aircraft had each other in sight.

“He pulled in behind us, we got the boom into the receptacle and started transferring fuel,” Hickman said. Then the boom operator saw fuel pouring back out of the F-111. The damage was worse than anyone had realised, and the fighter could not keep the fuel it was being given.

What “Locking the Toggles” Means

On a KC-135, the boom operator flies the telescoping boom into a receptacle on top of the receiving aircraft, where latching toggles grip the nozzle. In normal refuelling that connection is designed to break cleanly: if the receiver drifts out of position, the boom disconnects rather than risk damage to either aircraft.

Locking the toggles keeps the nozzle latched in the receptacle, so the connection holds even as the stricken jet struggles to stay in position. With the two aircraft joined, the tanker takes some of the load and the fuel keeps flowing continuously, replacing what leaks out faster than the fighter could otherwise hold it. Crews called it towing. It is not a routine procedure, and it depends on a steady receiver pilot and a skilled boom operator.

Out of North Vietnam

Locked together, the two aircraft flew out of North Vietnam and back toward Thailand, the tanker feeding the fighter all the way. Near the F-111’s base the boom operator unlocked the toggles and the fighter dropped off the boom. In a separate interview with his hometown paper, the Derby Informer in Kansas, Hickman said the pilot disconnected at 10,000 feet: “we watched him land with barely enough fuel, but he got on the ground safely.”

What the Retelling Gets Wrong

The core of the story comes straight from the Air Force interview, and the quotes in the post are accurate. Three details need care.

Position in the formation. The post says Hickman’s KC-135 was number one in a ten-tanker flight. In the Derby Informer interview, Hickman described his tanker as the last in a ten-plane refuelling flight. The Air Force article does not say either way.

The type. The Derby Informer account calls the fighter an FB-111. That cannot be right: the FB-111A was Strategic Air Command’s nuclear bomber and never deployed to Southeast Asia. The F-111s that flew over Vietnam were F-111As, and in the last phase of the war they operated from Takhli in Thailand with the 474th Tactical Fighter Wing, which returned to the theatre in September 1972. The Air Force’s own article correctly calls it an F-111 Aardvark.

When. Hickman remembered it as the next-to-last refuelling mission of the Vietnam War, which places it late in the conflict, after the F-111A’s return in 1972. We have not been able to identify the individual F-111 or its crew.

Not the Only Save

Hickman’s crew belonged to a long tradition. KC-135s began refuelling combat aircraft over Southeast Asia on 9 June 1964, and over the next nine years, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine, they flew 194,687 sorties and made 813,878 refuellings. No KC-135 was lost to enemy action. The phrase “Thanks, that’s a save” was heard more than 500 times over the radio during the war.

The most famous save came on 31 May 1967, when Major John Casteel’s KC-135 crew refuelled six aircraft in succession, including two Navy KA-3 tankers that were themselves passing fuel to Navy F-8 Crusaders, at one point creating a three-level refuelling chain. Casteel’s crew received the Mackay Trophy.

In the talk above, Jack Froelich describes USAF KC-135 tanker operations in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

Sources: US Air Force, 22nd Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs, “60 Years in the Air: The KC-135 during the Vietnam War” (A1C Tara Fadenrecht, 28 October 2015); Derby Informer, “Derby’s Hickman recounts highlights of Air Force career”; Air & Space Forces Magazine, “The Young Tigers and Their Friends”; US Air Force and US Department of Defense photo archives; Wikimedia Commons.