By Holly Bridges

Aircraft commander Captain Reid Johnson and co-pilot Capt Ryan O’Neill sit in the cockpit of their E-3 Sentry, an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft, like anxious hosts waiting for their guests to arrive.

Since taking off from their home base at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma about an hour ago, flying so far has been calm, straight and level. The aerospace controllers, signals operators and aircraft technicians in the back are enjoying a bit of a break, yet still at their posts.

While things in the cockpit are calm for now, the two pilots, with the help of the navigator and flight engineer, continue flying while waiting for a US Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker aircraft to arrive so they can perform what has been described as the most dangerous procedure the AWACS performs – air-to-air refuelling. Refuelling is vital to the AWACS, especially in places such as Afghanistan, where crews fly as many as 12 to 14 hours at a time, scanning the skies for suspicious aircraft and controlling the air space.

“The tanker is 1 000 feet [305 m] overhead and 38 miles [61 km] out,” Capt O’Neill calls out via the intercom. The aircraft is now only minutes away. He takes a moment to explain to some VIP passengers on board the training flight (held in September to commemorate 30 years of Canadians flying on AWACS at Tinker) what they are about to see.

“You’re going to see a boom. It’s going to look at you right in the face, right over top of us, then it’s going to plug into a hole over [the cockpit]. Then, you’re going to hear a big ‘clunk’. Then, you’ll hear ‘contact’, and then the fuel will start going. It’s pretty impressive if you’ve never seen it before.”

Then, just as he’s described, the tanker breaks through the clouds, seemingly out of nowhere, and approaches the AWACS. Closer, closer, closer it comes, until it is flying directly overhead, only 12 feet (3.6 m) above the AWACS. For the next 18 minutes, Capt Johnson jostles the stick back and forth, manually conning the aircraft to keep it flying it in synch with the tanker overhead.

“Two aircraft flying at 25 000 feet [7 620 m] at 400 miles an hour [644 km/h] passing gas from one to another is a supremely unnatural act,” says Colonel Scott Forest, vice commander of 552 Air Control Wing at Tinker AFB, where Capt Johnson, Capt O’Neill and 41 other Canadian Air Force officers and non-commissioned members are serving. “We kind of make it seem routine because of the training and the superior capabilities of the airmen, but as you watch it occur, you get to see how unnatural that act is.”

Unnatural, precise, concentrated, professional – all words that describe another successful training mission aboard the AWACS with Canadians at the helm, and all with enough gas to make it happen.