When a B-2 Spirit bomber lands at an airfield, it typically needs a crew of several maintainers who spring into motion to ready it for takeoff again.
But on May 28, two stealth bombers assigned to the 393rd Bomb Squadron at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, took on a novel mission: fly to Offutt AFB, Nebraska, where a single pilot from each aircraft would jump out and refuel the plane — alone.
“It is a recent concept for pilots, generally speaking, to refuel their very own aircraft, and do it in a timely manner,” Maj. Bo Bateman, a B-2 instructor pilot with the squadron, told Air Force Times.
Because the Air Force focuses on how it would win a protracted and widespread conflict within the Pacific, a part of its strategy is learning to be leaner. Under the “agile combat employment“ concept, a small team of multiskilled airmen should find a way to quickly deploy to a brand new, potentially austere, airfield where they’d need to assemble their very own operation with little to no additional support.
That flexibility can turn out to be useful for the B-2 fleet, whose ability to hold conventional and nuclear weapons between continents make it a central piece of the Air Force’s technique to deter conflict with other nuclear powers.
“This exercise is one other high quality example of bombers executing agile combat employment. It’s the primary time that the 393rd Bomb Squadron has executed B-2 ‘cold-pit’ refueling operations without the assistance of our maintenance professionals on the bottom,” Col. Geoffrey Steeves, 509th Operations Group commander, which oversees the 393rd Bomb Squadron, told Air Force Times in an announcement.
“Cold-pit” refueling is the Air Force’s term for gassing up a plane with its engine turned off.
“Ultimately, we’re posturing the B-2 to satisfy the challenges of the ‘great power competition’ head-on,” Steeves added.
To organize for the trip to Offutt, the squadron compiled multiple checklists utilized by maintainers and pilots to create a comprehensive flight-prep to-do list from the cockpit to the bottom.
The pilots also spent a few hours within the classroom at Whiteman — the Air Force’s sole B-2 base — brushing up on methods to service an aircraft. That training is already an annual requirement, Bateman said.
“Then we had two specific trips to the aircraft to work with maintenance personnel to run through the checklist and really practice flipping the switches for the fuels and running the checklist and hooking up the fuel receptacle to the aircraft,” he added.
Planning for the operation meant the aircraft needed to carry gear, like wheel chocks, a ladder, oil and hydraulic fluid, that it wouldn’t typically need because maintainers have already got those supplies available, said Capt. Andrew Dang, a B-2 pilot with the 393rd and an operational planner for the training run.
While a small recovery team was available at Offutt to resolve any maintenance issues that would have popped up, Bateman and Dang said the operation went off seamlessly.
Bateman, who previously flew the T-6 Texan II trainer as an instructor pilot, had never refueled his own plane before. After landing at Offutt, he jumped out of the bomber, secured the landing gear, chocked the wheels, and hooked himself as much as the aircraft’s communications system, with the fuel truck waiting far in the gap.
“It was pretty surreal, hopping down from the cockpit,” Bateman said.
Then he returned to the cockpit and continued down the checklist along with his co-pilot, including shutting down the aircraft.
With the engines off, Bateman then turned to refueling, a multistep process that included pulling various circuit breakers and covering up the sharp edges around landing-gear doors. After the fuel truck arrived, Bateman climbed a ladder to attach the fuel hose and signaled to start out the flow of gas.
“That was difficult since it must be seated properly,” Bateman said of connecting the hose. “With one individual, you actually need to get creative and maneuver the hose into the suitable spot.”
The team met its goal to finish all the refueling, from landing to takeoff, inside two hours.
“Two hours was hard,” Bateman said. “But going through the checklist easily allowed us to do it safely, and we showed that we will do it successfully.”
While the 393rd was the primary lively duty B-2 squadron to finish such a mission, it built off of the work of the one hundred and tenth Bomb Squadron, a Missouri Air National Guard unit at Whiteman that accomplished the same operation with a bigger maintenance footprint on a visit to Forbes Field Air National Guard Base, Kansas, in March. Those pilots also accomplished cold-pit refueling on their very own; the squadron will keep working with the 393rd as they move forward with agile combat operations.
“We iterated on [the Guard unit’s work] and went from a crawl phase, where we had, essentially, handholding through the method, to now saying, ‘Look, we developed this checklist we will do that, don’t need assistance,’” Dang said.
Now that they’ve shown it will probably be done, the goal is to streamline the operation and make it more efficient across the B-2 community, Bateman said. Their next steps include running the operation without maintainers standing by, adding the pilot-turned-maintainer choice to the training curriculum, and perfecting a packing list so the aircraft can carry the best equipment to get the job done.
As an illustration, Bateman said he needed to wrestle a 6-foot ladder out and in of the bomber when a step stool would have been sufficient.
The tip goal, Dang said, is to achieve the stage where pilots can land, refuel and take off again without shutting down the aircraft’s engines — or “hot-pit” refueling.
In a contested or unfamiliar environment, “I don’t need to be on the bottom any longer than I even have to be,” Dang said.
Courtney Mabeus-Brown is the senior reporter at Air Force Times. She is an award-winning journalist who previously covered the military for Navy Times and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., where she first set foot on an aircraft carrier. Her work has also appeared in The Latest York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and more.