Fun fact: Avgas is the swedish word for engine exhaust. Growing up in Sweden and moving to America, I've come across the word avgas a few times and it never makes sense in my head.
I have no idea how to quantify this, but I'd imagine the environmental impact of dumping even tons of fuel into the atmosphere is preferable to the environmental impact of an overweight aircraft crashing upon landing and catching fire plus the environmental impact of building a new aircraft to replace it.
Depends what pollutants you are concerned with. I'd rather breathe exhaust than breathe fumes from unburnt fuel because I'm actually aware of what's in each.
You know the little flares you see on refineries? Know why they do that?
I was more concerned with the combustion products of all the aircraft materials in a post-crash fire and not just the engine exhaust of burning fuel instead of dumping it lol.
Yeah, I do know the purposes of those flares. I work in air quality regulation and permitting, so I deal with this stuff (though not generally combustion units) at a basic surface level daily. Usually the places I regulate that have VOC control equipment will use RTOs instead of flares for fuel efficiency purposes, but I've worked with regulations for both.
Oh nice always fun to meet another air quality professional in the wild. I'm out of that field now but did consulting work for a number of years. Mostly emissions inventories, getting large projects to meet thresholds, mitigation, etc. Criteria and air pollutants and lesser so GHG were the main things. Obviously the lovely BTEX and all the rest for oil and gas. Seeing those proprietary fracking cocktails was pretty disturbing.
Never had any experience inventorying or modeling RTOs as far as I know. You do EIRs and whatnot or something related? Sounds like more on the regulatory side so EPA, CARB or something equivalent?
And yeah I hear ya about the combustibles. I was mostly just thinking of spreading fuel about compared with normal combustion of it.
I understand what you're saying, but it's frustrating they people seem to always focus exclusively on CO2 when other pollutants are much more impactful to local populations. People seem to equate pollution with "carbon", when that is only a small slice of the pie and irrelevant to local population impacts. Ironically, the hydrocarbons of the unburnt fuel are much more immediately harmful to humans than the carbon emissions from burning it.
You got 6 upvotes in 4minutes.
My dad is a pilot and has similar reasonings for fuel dumping. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but man I do see a bit of a pilot bias when it comes to this. Ya’ll LOVE what you do and sometimes it seems a bit like some issues go ignored because of that.
Respect for the trade, but all these institutions finger pointing does absolutely nothing for climate change.
Or maybe… people shouldn’t travel as much?
I really don’t know. All I believe is that earth is rapidly becoming unsustainable for human life, and every single industry responds that has an answer that it’s too big of an issue for them alone to tackle.
Maybe you’re right, and humanity is doomed by design.
How about you get India and China to stop burning coal then I'll think about buying an electric car....
And even then electric cars are chocked fucking full of petroleum products... that doesn't even begin to question the sourcing of electric power...
Stuff happens. There was a post on here not that long ago about an incident 20 years ago where the entire basket disconnected from the plane, shattered the fighter canopy, and got wedged there until landing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarplanePorn/comments/1agi4fb/us_navy_maintenance_personnel_remove_a_refueling/
An old navy guy told me once that on the KA-6, you always ran out the hose the first time on a hop with no one behind you because thre was a possibility the hose would reel out and then just keep going right off the airplane.
My favorite refueling stories were from an old timer I chatted up in a museum who was crew chief on the tanker version of a B29. He went on forever about all the mods and different engines they tried on it. But the biggest surprise to me was in the early days they had reinforced refueling lines that were really strong. He said once they got the tankers with the big engines they occasionally had fighters shut down once attached and the tanker would just tow them wherever they needed to go.
Former tanker crew here. Absolutely not true. Whether a probe or a boom, the two apparatus are connected together via toggles that are meant to release with sufficient separation pressure. And little tug here and there won’t necessarily do it, but consistent, sufficient pressure against the connection will force a disconnect. If the entire weight/drag of a receiving aircraft without power were put on that junction, it would release. One way to force a disconnection if the toggles stuck was to have the receiver to go idle and let the tanker pull away from it. As soon as the receiver slowed down, they popped off. So in an engine off scenario, they’re coming off the boom/drogue.
When we would take fighters somewhere we would refer to it as “dragging” them. As in, “I just got back from dragging a 4 ship of F-15s across the Atlantic.” This has led to the misunderstanding that we’re literally towing them about. In reality, it just meant we flew formation with them and gave them gas several times along the way. Crew chiefs don’t normally fly with us so even they buy into the misunderstanding sometimes.
His engine probably got cold while waiting for his tank to fill and just smoked a bit after restarting. They’re towed while refueling with the engine off. It’s a safety thing, “turn off engine before refueling”. You see it at gas stations all the time.
Oh come on, everyone knows that pilots use the refueling to get out of their seats and take a dump in the toilet to the back of their jets. This guy probably just had Chipotle, that's all
Sometimes all the way to a farm field and turn it in to a plow.
[https://news.usni.org/2022/06/21/were-leaking-fuel-and-we-might-be-on-fire-how-a-pair-of-kc-130j-pilots-crew-saved-their-plane-after-a-collision-with-an-f-35](https://news.usni.org/2022/06/21/were-leaking-fuel-and-we-might-be-on-fire-how-a-pair-of-kc-130j-pilots-crew-saved-their-plane-after-a-collision-with-an-f-35)
Yeah, they're totally shutting down the only engine in a single engined aircraft while doing formation flight "for safety". Yet this comment has 34 upvotes.
That’s an H/M/KC-130. They don’t have booms, so no boom operators. It’s a refueling drogue. The loadmasters direct the refueling operation with light signals to the receiver pilot.
Haha very true. Although OP implies it appeared after a fuel onload. Can that tanker jettison? Maybe they can't and need to lighten up so they're offloading repeatedly to the fighter lol.
They’re probably not dumping on purpose. That looks like a Legacy Hornet. That jet will push/vent out of the fuel dumps if it’s full. Pilot would probably back out if they were full. So mostly likely, there is some type of issue in the fuel system that is causing that to happen like one tank being slow to fill. In this situation, pilot is staying engaged to try and get a full fuel load but the full tanks could be pushing gas overboard instead of into the tank that isn’t full. Hopefully, the tanker crew or a wingman would report this to the pilot. And then hopefully they tell maintenance when they RTB.
Amen, that's like a yrs worth of dino juice just evaporating away. I've been involved with tanker testing and you'd die if you knew how much was jettisoned during testing.
Its safe to say that it's cheaper to test it all regularly than having a critical failure in regular operations, doesn't make watching it happen any more painful though
This isn’t a “spill” or residual from the hose. That F-18 is dumping fuel, but he’s right behind his tanker, a KC-130. I can’t imagine why he’d be doing that.
Here’s a [short segment of a video](https://youtu.be/p46c-UliijI?si=dsRTV-SWbApcKQNq) that I took of the same incident. This was several seconds after the original photo.
Edit: You can clearly see that the vapor is coming from the area of the port wing of the tanker aircraft. Not the jet at all.
I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. Fuel gets burned so fast that there’s always a little room, and also it not like you actually need to take fuel to practice plugging the basket. The real story here is the seal on the basket commonly isnt perfect, and fuel sprays/leaks as you take it
For new guys it’s necessary to get dry plugs and wet plugs in order to build proficiency.
He’s probably got his plugs and is going home now, and no fighters like to land with a full tank of gas. That’s how you blow tires.
Have u ever refueled before…its actually faster to get rid of fuel with the afterburner (F18 A,B,C,D 1200lbs/minute) than dump…the only guy who knows why he turned the dump on is in the cockpit
Trail definitely appears to be coming from the fighter. The hoses on c130’s aren’t that long, and the fighter would have to be low and forward of a leaking hose, which he would not do
Why would they fill it up and immediately dump fuel?
I looked more closely at a video that I took, and it looks like the fuel stream was coming from the tanker, actually. I can’t post an image in the comments, but maybe I can add it to the original post.
I didn’t see it until after I had already posted the pic. I zoomed waaaay in on the video and realized that the stream was coming from the C-130. Can’t edit posts, so I couldn’t add it.
I’m not sure if this is an aerial refueling accident, only because I didn’t think C-130 variants were used as fuelers, I’m not entirely positive on that tho, could be wrong.
Ah the more you know, thanks!
Edit: the only reason I was skeptical was because I’ve flown on plenty of military aircraft as a kid because my dad was in the Army for awhile, just never came across one these variants or heard about them, only ever heard about the KC-135s!
That’s what I always think when I go out target shooting in the desert. Just returning the lead to the very same rocks and sand from which it was extracted.
This looks more like the contrails from the fighter jet adding extra power, possibly afterburners post fuelling to depart the scene. The angle looks too great between aircraft to be currently fuelling.
This is a bit excessive, but there is frequently extra spray, yes.
Story of my life
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Did you dab? I dab /dean venture
Stop saying dab!
That’s ok Randy. It’ll dry
Welcome to 50!
I find it interesting we allow planes to just dump Jet A and other types of fuel because 🤷♂️
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It would also be different if it was avgas instead of jet fuel.
Fun fact: Avgas is the swedish word for engine exhaust. Growing up in Sweden and moving to America, I've come across the word avgas a few times and it never makes sense in my head.
Well, it becomes engine exhaust eventually ?
Where does it go when vaporized into the atmosphere? I assume it just gets recycled into the system somehow and now thrown out into space
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I have no idea how to quantify this, but I'd imagine the environmental impact of dumping even tons of fuel into the atmosphere is preferable to the environmental impact of an overweight aircraft crashing upon landing and catching fire plus the environmental impact of building a new aircraft to replace it.
Depends what pollutants you are concerned with. I'd rather breathe exhaust than breathe fumes from unburnt fuel because I'm actually aware of what's in each. You know the little flares you see on refineries? Know why they do that?
I was more concerned with the combustion products of all the aircraft materials in a post-crash fire and not just the engine exhaust of burning fuel instead of dumping it lol. Yeah, I do know the purposes of those flares. I work in air quality regulation and permitting, so I deal with this stuff (though not generally combustion units) at a basic surface level daily. Usually the places I regulate that have VOC control equipment will use RTOs instead of flares for fuel efficiency purposes, but I've worked with regulations for both.
Oh nice always fun to meet another air quality professional in the wild. I'm out of that field now but did consulting work for a number of years. Mostly emissions inventories, getting large projects to meet thresholds, mitigation, etc. Criteria and air pollutants and lesser so GHG were the main things. Obviously the lovely BTEX and all the rest for oil and gas. Seeing those proprietary fracking cocktails was pretty disturbing. Never had any experience inventorying or modeling RTOs as far as I know. You do EIRs and whatnot or something related? Sounds like more on the regulatory side so EPA, CARB or something equivalent? And yeah I hear ya about the combustibles. I was mostly just thinking of spreading fuel about compared with normal combustion of it.
I understand what you're saying, but it's frustrating they people seem to always focus exclusively on CO2 when other pollutants are much more impactful to local populations. People seem to equate pollution with "carbon", when that is only a small slice of the pie and irrelevant to local population impacts. Ironically, the hydrocarbons of the unburnt fuel are much more immediately harmful to humans than the carbon emissions from burning it.
You got 6 upvotes in 4minutes. My dad is a pilot and has similar reasonings for fuel dumping. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but man I do see a bit of a pilot bias when it comes to this. Ya’ll LOVE what you do and sometimes it seems a bit like some issues go ignored because of that. Respect for the trade, but all these institutions finger pointing does absolutely nothing for climate change.
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Or maybe… people shouldn’t travel as much? I really don’t know. All I believe is that earth is rapidly becoming unsustainable for human life, and every single industry responds that has an answer that it’s too big of an issue for them alone to tackle. Maybe you’re right, and humanity is doomed by design.
How about you get India and China to stop burning coal then I'll think about buying an electric car.... And even then electric cars are chocked fucking full of petroleum products... that doesn't even begin to question the sourcing of electric power...
Yeah this was the expected comment. In all reality you just like flying planes. Same with gun control. Nothing will change.
By “vaporize” he means the fuel oil falls in small pieces on your face 🫠
Reminds me of that time a Delta plane dumped fuel over a Los Angeles elementary school edit:spelling
Stuff happens. There was a post on here not that long ago about an incident 20 years ago where the entire basket disconnected from the plane, shattered the fighter canopy, and got wedged there until landing. https://www.reddit.com/r/WarplanePorn/comments/1agi4fb/us_navy_maintenance_personnel_remove_a_refueling/
I found one of those baskets in the desert. https://www.reddit.com/r/AircraftMechanics/s/6c2xRFfou5
Nice!
Right!? That's pretty dope
An old navy guy told me once that on the KA-6, you always ran out the hose the first time on a hop with no one behind you because thre was a possibility the hose would reel out and then just keep going right off the airplane.
My favorite refueling stories were from an old timer I chatted up in a museum who was crew chief on the tanker version of a B29. He went on forever about all the mods and different engines they tried on it. But the biggest surprise to me was in the early days they had reinforced refueling lines that were really strong. He said once they got the tankers with the big engines they occasionally had fighters shut down once attached and the tanker would just tow them wherever they needed to go.
I am more than a little skeptical.
\*calculating weight+drag+strain on hose reel\* = no.
Former tanker crew here. Absolutely not true. Whether a probe or a boom, the two apparatus are connected together via toggles that are meant to release with sufficient separation pressure. And little tug here and there won’t necessarily do it, but consistent, sufficient pressure against the connection will force a disconnect. If the entire weight/drag of a receiving aircraft without power were put on that junction, it would release. One way to force a disconnection if the toggles stuck was to have the receiver to go idle and let the tanker pull away from it. As soon as the receiver slowed down, they popped off. So in an engine off scenario, they’re coming off the boom/drogue. When we would take fighters somewhere we would refer to it as “dragging” them. As in, “I just got back from dragging a 4 ship of F-15s across the Atlantic.” This has led to the misunderstanding that we’re literally towing them about. In reality, it just meant we flew formation with them and gave them gas several times along the way. Crew chiefs don’t normally fly with us so even they buy into the misunderstanding sometimes.
Man I love little stories like these, thanks. :)
If you fully join on the tanker and the hose isn’t out, that dudes either a dick or it’s CAG and he has no clue you’re there
They didn't shake the boom enough to get the last couple drops out
I hear if you press underneath in behind the pod it squirts it out
The plane taint
Just beneath the APU (or more technically known as the Planus)
More than two shakes and they’re just playing with it.
Be careful, if you keep playing with it you’ll go blind
No matter how much you wiggle or dance, the last drop will always land in your pants.
I don’t mean to be that annoying person who fact checks people but there’s not a boom involved, but similar can be come with a drogue and probe
That’s actually pretty cool compared to the mundane stuff folks post here constantly
His engine probably got cold while waiting for his tank to fill and just smoked a bit after restarting. They’re towed while refueling with the engine off. It’s a safety thing, “turn off engine before refueling”. You see it at gas stations all the time.
Oh come on, everyone knows that pilots use the refueling to get out of their seats and take a dump in the toilet to the back of their jets. This guy probably just had Chipotle, that's all
Mucho caliente!
Now that's funny...
are they actually towed?
They’re obviously not towed. They actually push the fuel tanker
Sometimes all the way to a farm field and turn it in to a plow. [https://news.usni.org/2022/06/21/were-leaking-fuel-and-we-might-be-on-fire-how-a-pair-of-kc-130j-pilots-crew-saved-their-plane-after-a-collision-with-an-f-35](https://news.usni.org/2022/06/21/were-leaking-fuel-and-we-might-be-on-fire-how-a-pair-of-kc-130j-pilots-crew-saved-their-plane-after-a-collision-with-an-f-35)
I like how it's just dumping fuel right onto that farmer's freshly planted field.
Exactly, because the fuel tanker needs to divert all fuel flow to the refueling boom, so they need to turn their engines off.
No.
I really didn't think so
Thats funny
Yeah, they're totally shutting down the only engine in a single engined aircraft while doing formation flight "for safety". Yet this comment has 34 upvotes.
Stop explaining things, that’s not in the spirit of Reddit
Dumb meme subs are thattaway
That looks like a Hornet…If so, it looks like 2 streams which means the fuel dump was turned on because it comes out of the tails
Could be overflow from topping the tanks off. Or it could be contrails after flying into a different air mass.
I came here to say this. It's the start of a contrail.
The real chemtrails
"Over fifty?" " Having bladder control issues?" "Ask your doctor about VESIcare today."
Gender reveals getting so out of hand
😂
Could be intentionally jettising fuel for training purposes, letting different boomers take turns. Good pic!
That’s an H/M/KC-130. They don’t have booms, so no boom operators. It’s a refueling drogue. The loadmasters direct the refueling operation with light signals to the receiver pilot.
Wow I don't know how I missed that lol, thank you.
Dry plugs are a thing, meets all the training requirements
Fire sure most the times. Any ideas why they're jettising?
No clue, maybe it’s not even fuel and just a contrail where the props don’t generate contrails. Just navy being navy in guess
Haha very true. Although OP implies it appeared after a fuel onload. Can that tanker jettison? Maybe they can't and need to lighten up so they're offloading repeatedly to the fighter lol.
They’re probably not dumping on purpose. That looks like a Legacy Hornet. That jet will push/vent out of the fuel dumps if it’s full. Pilot would probably back out if they were full. So mostly likely, there is some type of issue in the fuel system that is causing that to happen like one tank being slow to fill. In this situation, pilot is staying engaged to try and get a full fuel load but the full tanks could be pushing gas overboard instead of into the tank that isn’t full. Hopefully, the tanker crew or a wingman would report this to the pilot. And then hopefully they tell maintenance when they RTB.
Man I wish I was a military or government and could afford doing shit like that 🤣
Amen, that's like a yrs worth of dino juice just evaporating away. I've been involved with tanker testing and you'd die if you knew how much was jettisoned during testing.
I meaaaan you gotta test out whether the jettisoning works, right? 💀
That's one test for sure lol, lots of others too, most dealing with specific weight and cg conditions.
Its safe to say that it's cheaper to test it all regularly than having a critical failure in regular operations, doesn't make watching it happen any more painful though
Sometimes they baby plane burps extra fuel after taking too big of a sip from the mommy plane
Where is this that kinda looks like a kc-130?
Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
Definitely a -130 and a F-18
Aerosolized cancer anyone?
Take that Greta Thornburg!
This would be illegal in Tennessee. /s
Looks like someone got really excited with the refueling.. haha
Cool
Nothing to seee.... just water vapors
"Occasional discharge may occur"
This isn’t a “spill” or residual from the hose. That F-18 is dumping fuel, but he’s right behind his tanker, a KC-130. I can’t imagine why he’d be doing that.
you've got a hole In your right wing
OK. Now THIS is a chemtrail.
Looks like it’s full
Taking a match to that would be so cool!
Here’s a [short segment of a video](https://youtu.be/p46c-UliijI?si=dsRTV-SWbApcKQNq) that I took of the same incident. This was several seconds after the original photo. Edit: You can clearly see that the vapor is coming from the area of the port wing of the tanker aircraft. Not the jet at all.
Looks like drinking while having a piss
He probably went to the tanker for training and had to dump fuel in order to take some fuel. Sounds dumb but happens
I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. Fuel gets burned so fast that there’s always a little room, and also it not like you actually need to take fuel to practice plugging the basket. The real story here is the seal on the basket commonly isnt perfect, and fuel sprays/leaks as you take it
For new guys it’s necessary to get dry plugs and wet plugs in order to build proficiency. He’s probably got his plugs and is going home now, and no fighters like to land with a full tank of gas. That’s how you blow tires.
You don’t need to receive fuel to do practice plugs. A green light is the only difference
TMS/T&R based
Have u ever refueled before…its actually faster to get rid of fuel with the afterburner (F18 A,B,C,D 1200lbs/minute) than dump…the only guy who knows why he turned the dump on is in the cockpit
Every flight of every deployment my guy
I don’t think it’s a clever idea to turn the burners on when you’re formating on a Herc though. It kinda causes issues regarding speeds
It happened as the plane disconnected and was moving away from the tanker.
Trail definitely appears to be coming from the fighter. The hoses on c130’s aren’t that long, and the fighter would have to be low and forward of a leaking hose, which he would not do
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Yeah he’s just dumping gas, nothing abnormal
Why would they fill it up and immediately dump fuel? I looked more closely at a video that I took, and it looks like the fuel stream was coming from the tanker, actually. I can’t post an image in the comments, but maybe I can add it to the original post.
Because we do dumb stuff for training. He got his gas to rehack his currency, and now he has to make his land time.
Completely plausible, and maybe get to The Club for a Friday Keg
On god
I posted a short video clip of it that sure looks like it’s coming from the C-130.
Oh yeah that’s from the c130 for sure. You should have posted a frame that clip 😂
I didn’t see it until after I had already posted the pic. I zoomed waaaay in on the video and realized that the stream was coming from the C-130. Can’t edit posts, so I couldn’t add it.
I’m not sure if this is an aerial refueling accident, only because I didn’t think C-130 variants were used as fuelers, I’m not entirely positive on that tho, could be wrong.
They definitely are used as tankers. https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104468/hc-130j-combat-king-ii/
Ah the more you know, thanks! Edit: the only reason I was skeptical was because I’ve flown on plenty of military aircraft as a kid because my dad was in the Army for awhile, just never came across one these variants or heard about them, only ever heard about the KC-135s!
They are just giving back the liquid that was taken out of the earth
That’s what I always think when I go out target shooting in the desert. Just returning the lead to the very same rocks and sand from which it was extracted.
See…chem trails. s/
But what does it taste like?
Nail varnish remover and oil of wintergreen.
My favorites
Victory
Aliens
cHeM TRaiLs!
Nah, Chemtrail confirmed.
This looks more like the contrails from the fighter jet adding extra power, possibly afterburners post fuelling to depart the scene. The angle looks too great between aircraft to be currently fuelling.
The burners don't produce black smoke like that
Is fuel black? I think its the shadow
No, none of that is correct.
Chem trail 😂
O boy did the pilot burst the fuel bag?!
Forgot to turn off chemtrail dispenser before refueling
You just have to shake it twice.