In mid February the KC-135 tankers from RAF Mildenhall deployed to RAF Fairford in preparation for their home runway being re-surfaced. Even though the two bases are no more than 200 miles apart this didn’t affect the number of people and amount of equipment needed.

As well as providing the same level of air refuelling capability as the Wing did from Mildenhall their aircraft also had to be washed, maintained and inspected like they would have been back home.

Trucks and tanker aircraft moved all of needed cargo to Fairford, 60,000lbs more than they took when deploying for Operation Iraqi Freedom and moved in less than half the time it took back then too. To date it’s been the largest movement in the Wing’s history.

Along with the mission equipment over 530 personnel deployed, most were from Mildenhall others were from other USAF bases in Europe. Over 200 of these were mission support, another 200 were aircraft maintenance, nearly 80 operations and command staff and 40 members from the 352nd Special Operations Group’s Maintenance Squadron.

As well as the 530 deployed personnel the tanker mission depended heavily on the 500 members of the 424th ABS to provide an air base capable of real world operations.

Although the 100th ARW has 15 aircraft assigned to it Fairford only ever had 14 on base and that was only for a very brief period. As much as possible one aircraft was kept at RAF Lakenheath where it was used for ground training and to let members of the Wing who didn’t deploy keep their flying qualifications current. The others that weren’t at Fairford were either on temporary duties supporting on-going operations around the world or helping fighter aircraft deploy across continents which often involved stopping at several bases en-route.
 

Even when forward deployed to Fairford crews and aircraft often forward deployed again to wherever their missions took them. In fact within the first 10 days of the move to Fairford the 100th’s KC-135s had been to South Africa, Eastern Europe, Nellis AFB Nevada, South-west Asia and the Netherlands, however every mission tasking given throughout the six month deployment was met regardless of where the aircraft were at the time.

Maintaining the KC-135s is a busy task normally but the experiences of deploying for Operation Iraqi Freedom meant ground crews were familiar with operating at forward deployment bases. Their job was to support over 580 hours of flying a month made of an average of 5 missions a day during the week. Additional operational support missions were sometimes flown at the weekends, an example was when President Bush came to Europe in June.



The pace of missions meant 30 aircraft washes had to be done on Fairford’s wash racks and 6 phase maintenance inspections needed completing at Fairford. These ‘ISO’ inspections saw more people deployed and kept an aircraft in the hangar for just over a week at a time.