ensures the availability of spare parts and experienced reserve pilots. No requirement for a next-generation tanker has been formally defined by the USAF, but McDonnell Douglas has drawings of a modular drogue-and-hose-reel refueling kit for the C-17 transport. It would not be surprising if Boeing proposes a tanker variant of its high-tech twin-engine wide body, the 777. Until that time, though, the KC-10 is going to continue to be the finest, most versatile airborne tanker aircraft in the world today.
Heavy Iron: The McDonnell Douglas C-17A Globemaster III
This is the story of an airplane program that would not die, despite the efforts, incompetence, and intentions of both friends and enemies. It is also the story of a requirement that was so visionary that it allowed this same aircraft to rise from the ashes time and time again. Lastly, this is a tale of the finest, most capable airlift aircraft ever built. This is the story of the McDonnell Douglas C-17 Globemaster III. The C-17 embodies everything the U.S. Air Force and the aerospace industry has learned about airlift in the past fifty years. The cost of the Globemaster is fearsome. You could build a good regional hospital or a small university for the current (1996) $175 million-dollar unit price of just one C-17A. Partly because of the high cost, the program has been dogged by bitter political, technical, and contractual problems and controversy. You would not even call it a pretty aircraft. However, to the military logistics planner, the airborne division commander, or the famine victim in a remote corner of the Third World, nothing could be more beautiful.
The C-17 was designed to combine the intercontinental range and heavy-lift capability of the C-5 Galaxy or C-141 Starlifter with the short- /rough-field performance of the C-130 Hercules. The original Air Force specification for the C–X (“Cargo-Experimental”) ran to hundreds of pages, but the key requirement was brutally simple: take off carrying a 70-ton M1 Abrams main battle tank and land on an unimproved runway no more than 3,000 feet/915 meters long and 60 feet/18 meters wide. It was a big order, and when the C–X program started, nobody was entirely certain that such an aircraft could be created. Read on, and I’ll try and tell you one hell of a story about this amazing bird.
The C-17’s official nickname, “Globemaster,” recalls the Douglas C-124, the USAF’s last piston-engined heavy transport, which served from 1949 to 1961, with a total of 447 airframes being built. But the true ancestry of the C-17 can be traced directly from an experimental cargo jet, the Douglas YC-15, of which only two were built in the 1970s to an Air Force requirement called the Advanced Medium Short Takeoff and Landing Transport (AMST). The original intention was to develop a replacement for the C-130, but the program was never funded due to post- Vietnam budget cuts, as well as the excellent cost and performance of the Hercules. Like the C-17, the YC-15 had four-turbofan engines carried in pylons on a high-mounted wing, and a massive slab of T-tail, but the wings were not swept and the aircraft was considerably smaller than the Globemaster.[45] The YC-15 utilized a set of special externally blown flaps to generate tremendous lift for short takeoffs. The engine exhaust nozzles were close to the underside of the wing, which was equipped with large two-segment slotted flaps along most of the trailing edge. When the flaps were fully extended, much of the thrust was deflected downward, causing an equal and opposite upward lift force (thank you, Mr. Newton). The flaps had to be made of titanium, to withstand the heat, but this was a small price to pay for a significant performance improvement.
The competing YC-14 prototype developed by Boeing used a somewhat different principle called “upper surface blowing” in which the engines were mounted well forward and above the wing. The engine exhaust created a low-pressure region across the wing’s upper surface, and the relatively higher pressure below the wing translated into increased lift.[46] It was this extra lift that made the short-field requirement of the C–X aircraft even possible, though it takes a bit more looking to understand why it was even needed.
One of the many unpleasant effects of the Vietnam War was to greatly increase the wear and tear on the Air Force’s fleet of Lockheed C-141 and C-5 long-range airlifters. By the late 1970s it was clear that sometime in the not too distant future, these aircraft would have to be replaced before their wings fell off from sheer metal fatigue.
However, the C–X program managers had a concept for the new airlifter strategic airlift overseas that was very different from the way it had been done previously. The concept of operations for military airlifts until the 1980s was a “hub and spoke” model, in which heavy (strategic) airlifters would deliver masses of troops, equipment, and supplies from the continental United States to large regional airports (like the great Rhein-Main complex near Frankfurt, Germany, or the magnificent airports and bases of Saudi Arabia), where they would be split out into smaller “tactical” packets that would be shuttled to small forward airfields by medium transport aircraft (C-130s). This was (and is) an efficient model, and is the basis for the current American civil air transport system. However, if you had to operate into an area where big airfields didn’t exist, or where the runways and supporting facilities had just been cratered by an enemy airstrike or “slimed” by a chemical warhead from a SCUD missile, then you were going to be out of luck.
This was how the idea was born of the C–X flying a cargo/equipment /personnel load directly to where it was going to be needed, without the need to stop at an intermediate hub. This was, and is, a great idea, though one that would cause the USAF and McDonnell Douglas no end of pain, and the taxpayers a good-sized mountain of money.
The start of the C–X program came at a time of crisis for the U.S., with the taking of our embassy in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan still fresh in the minds of Department of Defense leaders. The shortage of heavy airlift aircraft was enough to make some folks wish they had bought more C-5s. For others, it was the impetus to build an even better airlifter. The original C–X requirement envisioned production of a total of 210 airframes: 120 to replace the fleet of C-141 B Starlifters, and the remaining 90 to replace the force of C-5s when they wore out. All three large airframe manufacturers in the U.S. (Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas) submitted proposals based, as you might expect, upon their most recent military transport experience. Of the three, the McDonnell Douglas design based on the YC-15 scored the highest, and they were awarded a contract for what became known as the C-17 in August of 1981. Unfortunately, this would be the last good thing that would happen in the C–X program for a very long time. Almost immediately, politics and necessity began to exert a strong influence on the C-17.
The political element arrived with the coming of President Ronald W Reagan in 1981. His Administration began an almost immediate program of increasing military spending to reverse the decline in our forces that had occurred after Vietnam and during the Administration of President Jimmy Carter. While the Carter Administration had increased military spending at the end of their tenure as a result of the Iran crisis, the Reagan Administration ramped up the money machine even further. One of their first areas of increased spending was for increased strategic airlift capacity.
While the C-17 contract had been awarded the previous year, it would do nothing to increase the number of tankers and transports for some years to come. In addition, the awarding of the C-17 contract to McDonnell Douglas had angered the powerful senator from Georgia, Sam Nunn, who was the protector of Lockheed down in Marietta. So in one of those moves that defines politics as “the art of the possible,” the Reagan Administration came up with a clever compromise. The funding for C-17 was reduced and the program schedule stretched out into the late 1980s. Then, a huge buy of tanker/transports was authorized, based upon existing designs.
In January of 1982, Lockheed, Senator Nunn, and the state of Georgia got an order for a second production run of the Galaxy, designated the C-5B. Along with this came the sixty-aircraft buy of KC-10A Extenders, which would be built by McDonnell Douglas. This left the folks at Long Beach in a strange position. Their new transport aircraft program had just been drained of funds and stretched out, but they now had a huge multi-year contract to build tankers on an existing production line. One senior Douglas official described it like finding out the beautiful, rich girl you are dating is a blood relative. She will probably share the wealth eventually, but that will be the extent of the relationship!
For Jim Worshem, the legendary president of the Douglas Aircraft Company, these events forced him to make a number of pragmatic and common-sense moves. He shifted almost all the skilled engineers and technicians he had hired to work on the C-17 over to KC-10A tanker and commercial transport work, and adjusted the program schedule to reflect the new, stretched-out funding profile dictated by the USAF and Reagan Administration. In the
