{"id":1308569,"date":"2026-05-28T10:20:42","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T08:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/kc-135-stratotanker-battle-damage-mildenhall-iran-may-2026\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T22:20:01","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T20:20:01","slug":"kc-135-stratotanker-battle-damage-mildenhall-iran-may-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/kc-135-stratotanker-battle-damage-mildenhall-iran-may-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Battle-Damaged KC-135 Tankers Are Limping Home Through Mildenhall"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>.et_pb_title_container h1.entry-title { padding-top: 40px !important; }<\/style>\n<p>Plane spotters at RAF Mildenhall pulled out their long lenses last week and got a picture nobody at Air Mobility Command was hoping to see twice. A US Air Force KC-135R Stratotanker, peppered with what aviation analysts identified as shrapnel impacts down the fuselage and along the underside of one wing, was photographed on the parallel taxiway. It was not even the first: another patched-up Stratotanker had already transited Mildenhall in April. Same scars.<\/p>\n<p>The tankers are flying home from Operation Epic Fury \u2014 the roughly six-week US air campaign against Iranian nuclear infrastructure that is now paused. And what their fuselages quietly show is something the Air Force has not yet wanted to say out loud: Iranian strikes hit aircraft that the public side of the war has so far been kept silent about.<\/p>\n<div style=\"background:#f5f5f5;padding:16px 20px;margin:18px 0 24px;border-radius:8px;font-size:15px;line-height:1.7\"><p style=\"margin:0 0 8px;font-weight:700;color:#333;font-size:16px\">Quick Facts<\/p><p style=\"margin:6px 0\"><strong>Where:<\/strong> RAF Mildenhall, Suffolk, UK<\/p><p style=\"margin:6px 0\"><strong>Aircraft:<\/strong> Boeing KC-135R Stratotanker (call signs not released)<\/p><p style=\"margin:6px 0\"><strong>Damage:<\/strong> Shrapnel impacts on fuselage and wing underside<\/p><p style=\"margin:6px 0\"><strong>Source of damage:<\/strong> Shrapnel from Iranian missile strikes during Operation Epic Fury (spring 2026)<\/p><p style=\"margin:6px 0\"><strong>Total US aircraft losses, Epic Fury:<\/strong> 40+ damaged or destroyed (TWZ tally)<\/p><\/div>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">A tanker is supposed to be invulnerable<\/h2>\n<p>That is not strictly true. But the doctrine of operational air war has always been that high-value air assets \u2014 tankers, AEW, ISR \u2014 operate inside a friendly umbrella, hundreds of miles back from the contested airspace, where the shooter fighters can reach them and the SAMs cannot. The visible damage to these KC-135s points to a different problem: Iran&#8217;s long-range missiles reached the tankers on the ground, at bases doctrine assumed were safely behind the lines.<\/p>\n<p>Iranian air defences during Epic Fury included several systems the US had not seen in significant numbers in earlier engagements: Bavar-373 long-range SAMs, the upgraded Sayyad-4B interceptor, and the Khordad-15 mobile system. Several of these have advertised engagement ranges well over 200 km. A KC-135 with a refuelling boom out is, by any radar&#8217;s standards, a slow, predictable, very large target.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px\"><img data-opt-id=1068699697  fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ml5psubhxdln.i.optimole.com\/cb:0e0_.b970\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/05\/kc-135r-refueling-f-15c-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"KC-135R refuels F-15C Eagle\" style=\"max-width:100%;height:auto;border-radius:6px\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">A KC-135R Stratotanker refuelling an F-15C Eagle. The tanker fleet flew thousands of sorties during Operation Epic Fury \u2014 and at least two came home with visible battle damage. Photo: US Air Force \/ Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">What the photos actually show<\/h2>\n<p>The latest set of images, taken by aviation photographer Andrew McKelvey and published by The War Zone, shows the jet \u2014 KC-135R 63-8028 of the Alaska Air National Guard&#8217;s 168th Wing \u2014 peppered with patched-over shrapnel holes across its tail, flaps and vertical stabiliser, and missing its refuelling boom entirely. The maintainers at Mildenhall \u2014 which is home to the 100th Air Refueling Wing, the USAF&#8217;s only permanent forward-based tanker wing in Europe \u2014 have been working through the airframes since they arrived.<\/p>\n<p>The Air Force has not officially said where either jet was hit. The most likely explanation is the Iranian long-range missile strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on 14 March, which reportedly damaged five tankers on the ground \u2014 though The War Zone notes flight-tracking data for 63-8028 muddies the picture, and the jet could have been hit somewhere else. Either way, the tankers were patched up in the field and flown home \u2014 which is, in itself, a quiet endorsement of the Stratotanker&#8217;s airframe robustness.<\/p>\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #1565c0;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;border-radius:0 8px 8px 0;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7;display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start\"><div><em>&ldquo;Another battle-damaged KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling jet arrived at RAF Mildenhall. The images of the shrapnel-peppered KC-135 are another example of the damage inflicted by Iran during the now-paused war.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Howard Altman<\/strong> &mdash; Senior staff writer, The War Zone<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">More than 40 aircraft, and counting<\/h2>\n<p>The War Zone\u2019s running tally of known Epic Fury losses puts the figure at more than 40 American aircraft damaged or destroyed \u2014 among them dozens of MQ-9 Reapers, an E-3 Sentry destroyed on the ground, and two KC-135s involved in a fatal mid-air collision over Iraq in March. Battle damage that did not result in a write-off is a separate, much larger, less-publicised number.<\/p>\n<p>The KC-135 fleet is 68 years old as a type. The youngest airframe in service was delivered in 1965. The Air Force is in the middle of replacing them with the KC-46A Pegasus, but the Pegasus has its own well-documented vision-system problems, and Epic Fury was fought overwhelmingly by Stratotankers. That those tankers are now coming back to England with scars on their wings is the quiet end-of-war report nobody in the Pentagon press room has called a briefing about.<\/p>\n<p><em>Sources: The War Zone, US Air Force.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Plane spotters at RAF Mildenhall pulled out their long lenses last week and got a picture nobody at Air Mobility Command was hoping to see twice. A US Air Force KC-135R Stratotanker, peppered with what aviation analysts identified as shrapnel impacts down the fuselage and along the underside of one wing, was photographed on the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":1308507,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","editor_notices":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[664,670],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1308569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-military-aviation","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Battle-Damaged KC-135 Tankers Are Limping Home Through Mildenhall | MiGFlug.com Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Plane spotters at RAF Mildenhall pulled out their long lenses 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Sharp, witty, and allergic to jargon, he turns breaking defence news into stories that are as entertaining as they are informative.","url":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/author\/josephduncan\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1308569"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1733379,"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308569\/revisions\/1733379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1308507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1308569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1308569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/jetflights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1308569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}