The photographs are jarring. A KC-135R Stratotanker — the aircraft that keeps every American warplane in the sky — sits on the apron at RAF Mildenhall, England, covered nose to tail in metal patches. Dozens of them. Each one marks a shrapnel hole punched by an Iranian ballistic missile that struck Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia last month. The tanker flew home anyway. Aviation photographer Andrew McKelvey captured the images on April 12 as the aircraft stopped in the UK on its way back to the United States. The Ohio Air National Guard’s 121st Air Refueling Wing owns the jet. It had been forward-deployed to Saudi Arabia as part of the massive aerial refuelling operation supporting Operation Epic Fury when Iran struck. The patches tell a story that press briefings rarely do. This is what combat looks like when ballistic missiles find a flight line.

The Strike on Prince Sultan

In mid-March, Iran launched a long-range ballistic missile salvo against Prince Sultan Air Base — one of the critical hubs for American air operations in the Gulf. Five KC-135 tankers were damaged on the ground. At least one E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft was also reportedly struck. The base had been a linchpin of the aerial refuelling effort that keeps F-15Es, F-35s, and B-1 bombers in the air over Iran around the clock. The KC-135 fleet is the backbone of American airpower projection. Without tankers, fighter jets cannot reach their targets. Bombers cannot loiter. Surveillance aircraft cannot stay on station. Hitting the tankers on the ground was a calculated Iranian move aimed at degrading the one capability the entire air campaign depends on.

Field Repairs Under Pressure

What makes this aircraft remarkable is not the damage — it’s the fact that maintenance crews patched it well enough to fly it out. Each silver patch visible in the photographs represents a shrapnel penetration that was assessed, cleaned, sealed, and riveted by airmen working on an active flight line in a war zone. The repairs are not cosmetic. Every patch had to restore the aircraft’s pressurisation integrity and structural strength to a level safe enough for a transatlantic ferry flight. The KC-135 is a militarised Boeing 707 airframe — tough, but not designed to absorb missile fragments and keep flying. That it did is a testament to the maintenance crews who refused to write it off. The tanker’s route home — from Saudi Arabia through RAF Mildenhall and onward to the continental United States — suggests it is headed for depot-level maintenance at a facility like Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, where the USAF performs heavy KC-135 overhauls.

The Tanker Problem

The KC-135 has been the workhorse of American aerial refuelling since the 1950s. The fleet is old. Most airframes have more than 60 years of service. The KC-46 Pegasus is its replacement — but the KC-46 programme has been plagued by delays, and there are nowhere near enough new tankers to replace the roughly 400 KC-135s still flying. Losing five tankers in a single strike — even temporarily — creates a gap that ripples through every air tasking order in the theatre. Each KC-135 can offload roughly 200,000 pounds of fuel per mission. Multiply that by five aircraft flying multiple sorties a day, and the math gets ugly fast.

The photographs from Mildenhall are a rare window into the real cost of this war — not in dollars or diplomacy, but in rivets, patches, and the quiet work of airmen who fixed what a ballistic missile broke. Sources: The War Zone, Military Times, Air & Space Forces Magazine, The Aviationist