The Royal Air Force flies several aircraft that it cannot refuel. This is not a secret, and it is not new, but it is faintly absurd, and it has finally produced an answer.

In a written answer on 2 September, Minister of State for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard confirmed that the RAF will add a flying boom to its air-to-air refuelling capability. It is the first time a minister has said so on the record.

What the minister said

The confirmation came in response to a written question from opposition MP Ben Obese-Jecty. The wording is short and, by the standards of parliamentary answers, unusually clear.

The Aviationist had reported in July that anonymous officials said a boom option was being “looked at.” A ministerial answer moves it from rumour to policy — even if the timing, the funding and the hardware are all still unresolved.

The embarrassing gap

The practical problem is easy to state. Probes and drogues are fine for fighters. Big aircraft — maritime patrol, signals intelligence, transport, airborne early warning — are almost universally built with a boom receptacle on the spine, because a boom moves fuel far faster than a hose can.

The RAF flies the P-8A Poseidon, the RC-135W Rivet Joint and the C-17A Globemaster III. None of them can take fuel from a Voyager. In August, a French Air and Space Force A330 MRTT refuelled both American and British RC-135s over France, which was a fine demonstration of allied integration and also a rather pointed illustration of the problem.

Add the incoming F-35A and E-7A Wedgetail and the list of RAF aircraft dependent on somebody else’s tanker gets longer, not shorter.

GCAP is probably the real driver

The likeliest reason this has moved now is not the Poseidon. It is the fighter that does not exist yet. The sixth-generation aircraft being developed under the Global Combat Air Programme with Italy and Japan is designed with a boom receptacle.

A retractable probe could in principle be fitted. But GCAP is expected to be a very large fighter, and a hose-and-drogue system may simply not shift fuel fast enough to fill it in an operationally useful time. If the UK wants to refuel its own next-generation fighter, it needs a boom.

Modify, or buy new?

Here is where it gets complicated. The A330 MRTT is sold with a boom and plenty of operators have one. The RAF’s aircraft are not RAF aircraft in the ordinary sense: they belong to the AirTanker consortium and are leased to the service under a private finance initiative that runs until 2035, after which they are due to pass into RAF ownership — by which time they will be older than nearly every other MRTT flying.

Modifying leased aircraft that are already the oldest of their type, in order to support a fighter that enters service in the 2030s, is not obviously the right answer. New-build aircraft from the upgraded MRTT+ line might be. The Ministry of Defence has not said, and may not yet have decided.

There is one neat side-effect worth noting. The A330 MRTT can only be refuelled itself by a boom. Adopting one would let RAF tankers refuel each other again — a capability the service lost when the VC10 and TriStar, both fitted with probes, retired.

Airbus demonstrating the A330 MRTT’s aerial refuelling boom system, including fully automatic contacts — the capability the RAF has never bought.

For now the RAF has a policy and no hardware. But after a decade of aviation writers pointing out that Britain cannot refuel its own spy planes, somebody in government has finally said the word “boom” out loud.

Sources: The Aviationist, UK Parliament written questions and answers, Ministry of Defence, Airbus, Royal Australian Air Force / Wikimedia Commons.