Why U.S. Air Force Just Flew A KC-46 With Only One Pilot

AURORA, Colorado—A Boeing KC-46 took off from its home base in Kansas on Oct. 25 and flew west toward military airspace in Utah in a mission to test a new tactic for the refueler, one that has become controversial since the plan first came to light over the summer. 

When the tanker crossed into the Utah Test and Training Range, the aircraft’s cockpit downsized to one pilot and one boom operator at the controls of the refueling system; typically the KC-46 has one pilot as the mission commander next to a co-pilot, along with two boom operators working together.

For one sortie, the KC-46 flew a refueling orbit with no contacts. For the second, one pilot flew the aircraft and one boom operator refueled receiving aircraft. For each, a full aircrew was on standby in the back just in case. 

According to Air Mobility Command (AMC) boss Gen. Mike Minihan—who has said he doesn’t think fighter pilots alone have the “God-given right” to fly solo—the reduced aircrew test is a way to develop a new tactic for his refueling force should it be needed in a large-scale war across the vast distances of the Pacific. But immediate reaction online pointed to it as the U.S. Air Force further stressing a pilot force that is already overworked, an unsafe plan that removes redundancy at the controls, and simply another way the service wants to do more with less.

For a further explanation of why the command wants to clear its refueling pilots to operate solo, we can look to another test mission three weeks earlier. On Oct. 4, two KC-135s took off from Fairchild AFB, Washington, and operated nonstop for 72 hr., keeping their engines running the whole time for multiple refueling missions over three days while only landing to swap out crews. 

But if the pilots are trained and the tactic cleared, a future endurance mission with an air-refuelable tanker would not require the aircraft to land for crew swap outs. The tankers could stay aloft well beyond typical duty days to have a boom in the air available for combat aircraft without risking landing at a base where they could be a target. 

“In my mind, it’s really a tactic, technique and procedure that I need to develop so that if I’m doing long missions in the Pacific, I can have a pilot and a boom execute the mission, while a pilot and the boom are in the bunk grabbing a little sleep, so they can swap out and get after extremely long duty days that I believe will be required to win the fight,” Minihan said in an Oct. 29 interview.

Right now, AMC is not at war. It has the time to develop new tactics and ensure they are safe, he argues. “I’m an operational commander, and I have an obligation to make sure that the force is ready for what the fight is really going to look like,” he says. “What I don’t want to do is get in a situation where ... for the first time they’re experiencing a 40-hr. day or a 36-hr. day is while they’re also getting shot at.” 

For now, AMC is reviewing the lessons from the Oct. 25 test to determine if the reduced aircrew tactic is something they should continue and get pilots to start training for in simulators. While the plan is just to focus on the KC-46, there are situations that could arise for other aircraft. For example, AMC doesn’t want C-17s to fly with one pilot and one loadmaster just for the sake of it, Minihan says. However, in a real-world fight when a base comes under attack, the airlifters may need to quickly take off with just one pilot.

The push for reduced aircrew is one of a few steps Minihan is taking to shape his command to move more quickly to be ready for a major war regardless of restrictions. In Minihan’s office at Scott AFB, Illinois, he has a countdown set to a self-imposed deadline of August 2023 to have the mobility force ready to fight inside the first island chain in the Pacific. For example, in September Minihan cleared the KC-46 fleet to deploy for real-world operations even though the aircraft will not reach formal initial operational capability (IOC) until late 2025 as Boeing works to overhaul its troubled remote vision system. 

Minihan, himself a C-130 pilot, pointed to an experience he had more than 20 years ago. Before Sept. 11, 2001, very few Hercules pilots were qualified on flying with night-vision goggles because it was a capability that was only needed for a few special operations missions. But after the attacks and the war in Afghanistan started, “everyone got thrown a pair of NVGs,” he says. 

“What are the things out there right now that we can anticipate that we may have to do in a high-end fight, that doesn’t have to be that approach—that I can work now, in advance, so that I understand and can mitigate and accept the risk as opposed to doing it when it’s needed,” he says.