Can you elaborate on this for me? You've got some stories to tell and I definitely think you don't post on here enough. It's guys like you that keep guys like me from killing myself and the innocents on the ground.
During the Vietnam war (?) the USAF based tankers in Thailand, Taiwan and in the Pacific to support the fighters and bombers. One main base, U-tapao was in Sattahip on the coast of Thailand. The base was also home to the large B-52D unit that operated mostly in country until Nixon started the Linebacker sorties. You can google-earth and see the field. It is still active.
Anyway, it was fairly common to launch a 2-5 ship cell of tankers to support the fighters going north to Hanoi and other cities in North Vietnam. IF you were headed for a big strike, you generally had 4-5 fighters assigned to you and so with 5 tankers and 5 fighters on each tanker, there would be 30+ airplanes waddling north.
This day, Harry and I had been sent to the border along Laos or Cambodia and were refueling fighters going into no-where since we didn't acknowledge we were IN Cambodia or Laos. After we had refueled all the receivers we headed home. As you know, you can roll any airplane but the problem is if you don't roll fast enough or don't get the nose high to start the roll or keep pulling as you roll, the nose will drop and then you wind up doing a nose-low recovery that can easily wind up in a high speed dive. And a machine built to go fast will build up speed very very rapidly nose low.
In this video of Tex Johnson rolling the 707, note the angle of the engines to the horizon and you can see the nose is ABOVE the horizon while the 707 is inverted. Well, Harry didn't get the nose high enough or didn't roll fast enough but anyway, he screwed up and quickly reversed the roll and recovered.
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As you can imagine, young aviators in the combat theatre can quickly dream up all sorts of stuff to see what happens. No doubt the limits are much tighter now than then and the consequences for screwing around more severe. Anyway, in another sortie, a friend of mine decided to take a nap and leave the airplane in the hands of his less-than-capable copilot. They were draining fuel to the aft fuel tank to give to receivers and AJ went to sleep. Soon, the nav came back yelling they were having a hard time maintaining level flt with full military power. AJ ran up front to see the copilot had not stopped the fuel transfer and the aft fuel tank was quite full and very little fuel forward. The -135 was WAY out of normal CG. AJ had no other choice but to dump thousands of pounds of fuel. And he did.
Finally, if you have not done acro or have not rolled an airplane or looped one,
don't do it without some instruction FROM SOMEONE WHO HAS DONE ACRO. And use an airplane stressed for acro. Yes, any airplane can be rolled but it is just wiser to use one designed for such the first times.
