No pain no gain

That reliability rate shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, after all the KC-30 is based on the well-proven Airbus A330-200 airliner. But still it is an impressive figure given the aircraft is operating at the end of a long supply chain a long way from home base in Australia and Airbus’s facilities in Spain and France.

And so that impressive fuel offload figure is in part thanks to that airline-like reliability rate.

But that’s not the only reason the KC-30 is the “tanker of choice” in theatre. Thanks to the aircraft being fitted with Link 16 and SATCOM, the KC-30’s crew can see coalition fighters in the battlespace, anticipate what their refuelling needs might be, and position the aircraft to allow the fighters to be refuelled and return to their combat mission as efficiently as possible.

It’s that combination of reliability and adaptability that has earned the KC-30 the “tanker of choice” sobriquet.

But it is also the outcome of the willingness to accept some development risk in military acquisition programs. Remember it is barely a year ago that the KC-30 was removed from the then Defence Materiel Organisation’s ‘projects of concern’ list of acquisition programs needing remediation due to delays.

As Boeing is now showing with its 767-based KC-46 Pegasus for the US Air Force, developing tankers is hard. The first RAAF KC-30 delivery occurred 18 months late, and that was before the program suffered the ignominy of losing a boom (the first RAAF KC-30, being used by Airbus as a development aircraft, lost its boom while refuelling an F-16 off the coast of Spain in January 2011).

Granted, most of the KC-30’s receiver aircraft in the Middle East have been probe and drogue-equipped RAAF, US Navy and Marine Corps fighters, rather than boom receptacle-equipped aircraft (the KC-30 has only been refuelling RAAF Wedgetails in theatre since October while recent refuelling trials should see it formally cleared to refuel the USAF’s F-16 shortly).

But the RAAF’s willingness to accept some risk in selecting the KC-30, and its willingness to persevere with the program when it encountered difficulties, is now being repaid in spades with a world-class and in-demand tanker capability – so much so that Australia has ordered two additional aircraft and the recent Defence White Paper suggested another two may also be acquired, taking the total fleet to nine.

Another lesson from the KC-30 is how acquisition delays are managed. Rather than the prescriptive enforcement of every last contracted requirement, the Commonwealth (led by then Air Vice-Marshal Chris Deeble, fresh from his success in remediating the Wedgetail program, and now, out of uniform, tasked with leading the OneSky joint Airservices-ADF air traffic management project) and Airbus negotiated in good faith on what requirements were needed and what were not, and what the solutions to development issues should be. The outcome, not the process, was the driving goal.

The end result, just like the once-troubled Wedgetail, is a world-class capability, where some early pain has been worth the ultimate gain.

That’s not a new lesson (think F-111), but one that also holds true for the F-35, which now looks to be reaching its potential on the cusp of entering RAAF service after its own significant development issues.

On the other hand, there’s always the question of how much risk to take on, versus how soon a military requirement is needed. There are plenty of examples of cancelled military development programs that were just too ambitious (or perhaps just too poorly managed) – the Australian Seasprite program for one.

But in today’s era of ‘FMS is best’ it is important to remember that some (development) risk can lead to great (capability) rewards.

Another lesson from the KC-30 is how acquisition delays are managed.