j_hungary
Professional
You need a receiver to take fuel in flight with a boom. And you need to have a probe to do probe and drougue refuelling.Hang on. I’m confused now. Tankers have booms . They are basically civilian aircraft and repurposed with a boom. There’s another method called PROBE-AND-DROGUE that has a long tube and a basket is used. The basket connects to probe of the aircraft. Hopefully US will release the information to put an end to this mystery.
The receiver is like this on top of the aircraft

The Probe is like this on the side of the aircraft

Neither KC-135R has either of those; only KC-135R(RT), which is a specialised version of KC-135R that has a boom receiver upgrade (The USAF only has 8 of them). And I have looked it up from the military's own database to actually verify the serial number of both aircraft involved and confirm both aren't KC-135R(RT)
So while I can't tell you why the two planes crashed, I can tell you from my research that they weren't refuelling each other, because they can't, and that's the matter of fact.






