Navy Aerial Tanker Update
Details on the Navy’s MQ-25 Stingray unmanned tanker have been hard to come by, especially the most relevant ones like fuel loads and range. Now, however, we see some details in a USNI News article (1).
“Air Boss Vice Adm. Mike Shoemaker said the service’s goal was for the Navy’s first operational carrier-based unmanned aerial vehicle to be able to deliver about 15,000 pounds of fuel at 500 nautical miles from the carrier to the air wing’s strike fighters, which would almost double their operational range.”
So, that’s interesting … 15,000 lbs of fuel at 500 nm from the carrier. Let’s examine that a bit closer.
An F-18 Super Hornet has an internal fuel capacity of around 14,000 lbs. So, the unmanned tanker could completely refuel one aircraft. Of course, that’s not exactly how refueling works. Each aircraft would receive a lesser amount of fuel, say 5,000 lbs. Thus, the tanker could refuel three aircraft. I think you can see where this is going. If there are 30 aircraft in a strike package, and each needed 5,000 lbs of fuel, it would require 10 tankers. That’s a LOT of tankers. Of course, more tankers would be required for the carrier overhead/recovery tanking. We’re looking at around 16 tankers in our strike/recovery scenario. Yikes!
Now let’s refer back to that quote and the phrase, “double their operational range”. Here’s the relevant range figure according to the article.
“The strike range of a carrier air wing is now only about 450 nautical miles – the effective unrefueled radius of a Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet.”
That range figure is exceedingly optimistic but, hey, let’s work with it for the sake of discussion.
So, if it took 15,000 lbs of fuel to achieve an operational range of 450 nm, adding 5,000 lbs of extra fuel (36% of the aircraft’s full fuel capacity) isn’t going to double the aircraft’s range, it’s going to increase the range by 36% which is an extra 160 nm. Yes, I know the range calculations aren’t a simple linear function. I’m just illustrating the concept. No matter how you look at it, we aren’t going to double an aircraft’s range by adding a small fraction of additional fuel. The only way we can double the range is to do a complete refueling which takes us back to a 1:1 tanker:aircraft ratio. In that case, our example strike of 30 aircraft would require 30 tankers!
Does no one in the Navy run these simple calculations? Apparently not.
Does no one in the Navy run these simple calculations? Apparently not.
Let’s refer back to the excellent post by guest author George Bustamante, “Why The Navy Needs A Really Large Tanker” (2). In that article, he lists fuel capacities of various tankers and demonstrates why a capacity of 15,000 lbs of fuel is insufficient for a mission tanker. For example, the old KA-3 Skywarrior tanker carried 29,000 lbs of fuel - almost double that of the proposed unmanned tanker. At the high (and useful) end, the KC-135 carries 150,000 lbs!
The MQ-25 Stingray, with a 15,000 lb fuel capacity barely duplicates the current F-18 Super Hornet tanker capacity of ~16,000 lbs. The F-18 isn’t considered a mission tanker so how will the MQ-25 which barely duplicates the F-18 tanker’s load suddenly and magically become an effective mission tanker? Unless we’re going to build lots and lots of these unmanned tankers, I just don’t see this as an effective solution for mission tanking – for overhead/recovery tanking, yes, but mission tanking, no.
So, we have fraudulent claims about doubling the air wing’s range combined with an utterly ineffective mission tanker specification. I don’t see a good outcome, here. Yes, it can free up the Hornet from overhead/recovery tanking, which is good, but it leaves the Navy with short ranged aircraft and still no effective mission tanker. The Navy had an opportunity to do something that could significantly enhance the air wing’s combat effectiveness and apparently have declined to do so. Baffling.
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(1)USNI News website, “MQ-25 Stingray Unmanned Aerial Tanker Could Almost Double Strike Range of U.S. Carrier Air Wing”, Sam LaGrone, 31-Aug-2017 ,
(2)Navy Matters blog, “Why The Navy Needs A Really Large Tanker”, George Bustamante, 22-Aug-2016 ,
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