Once again down at the lake (actually, most of the lake photos all came from the same day, but still unrelated and random,) I heard the passing of a jet and looked around, but didn’t think a whole lot of it because the lake sits near the approach corridors for the nearest major airport and this happens all the time. But then in the search for more birdlife, I looked almost directly overhead and saw this:
Well, not exactly this, because this was with the Tamron 150-600 at 600mm and cropped tighter for that – what I could see before raising the camera was just enough of a double-winged outline to know what I was looking at. I’ve only seen it in person once before, too, many moons ago in central New York. This is what mid-air refueling looks like from underneath.
Mostly, anyway – I don’t think they were actively refueling because the refueling boom (evidenced by that tiny little fin sticking out from the forward plane just ahead of the tail) appears to still be in stowed position, plus both aircraft were banking. The lead aircraft, according to my FlightRadar24 smutphone app, is a Boeing KC-135R Stratotanker from Tampa, while the trailing aircraft, according to my knowledge of military aircraft, is a McDonnell-Douglas/Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, which like many military flights, did not show up on FlightRadar24 – I was a little surprised to find that the KC-135 did, and also that it had come from Tampa and not Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, much closer in Goldsboro NC, because I know that they have an air refueling wing there.
According to the app, these aircraft were flying at 27,000 feet at the time, and while the trailing aircraft seems much closer, it isn’t by more than a hundred meters, probably half that – the Globemaster is a heavy-lifter cargo aircraft and is much broader in body width than the Stratotanker. But a neat capture for the day, and I almost missed it.