Sebastien Roblin
Technology, Americas
Key point: Tankers are vulnerable but needed to extend the range of stealth fighters, so why not make a stealth tanker?
The United States has devoted billions of dollars to building stealth fighters, stealth bombers, stealth cruise missiles and stealth spy drones. Surely a stealth tanker for refueling aircraft midflight would be an extravagance too much?
However, the concept of a stealth tanker is not as absurd you’d think for one simple reason: the Pentagon’s F-35 and F-22 stealth fighters, which it has made the lynchpin of its twenty-first century air warfare strategy, simply can’t fly far enough.
At first glance, the F-35’s six to eight-hundred-mile range doesn’t seem bad compared to conventional fighters like the Super Hornet or F-16. But those non-stealth designs can carry fuel in in underwing tanks into combat—meanwhile, an F-35 can’t carry those extra lumps of metal under its wings if it wants to preserve its miniscule radar cross-section.
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