Lockheed C-5 Galaxy

For over 75 years, the United States Air Force has been able to deploy and sustain forces at a time and place of its choosing, but a series of converging challenges have undermined that ability.

Key mobility platforms like the C-5 and C-17 are aging, parts are harder to come by, and the long legs required to cover the Pacific Theater consume flight hours faster, shortening the time between maintenance cycles.

Meanwhile, integrating new capabilities to outpace an accelerating threat demands additional downtime the fleet can ill afford.

In response, the Air Force has initiated two efforts set against ambitious timelines.

In June, the Air Force published a request for information to acquire a next-generation airlift or NGAL platform to replace both the C-5 and C-17.

At the same time, the Air Force is putting funds toward a new research and development program, Large Aircraft Survivability Systems, or LAS, to equip airlifters and aerial refuelers with their own defensive weapon systems.

Welcome to the Alera Edge.

Happy to be here, Scott.

We loaded it up with 18,000 pounds of equipment and flew from Minneapolis to Air Force Plant 42, Site 10, which is the, the now today's Skunk Works, and we dismantled, uh, A-12 number 128 on the ramp of the Skunk W- which is now the Skunk Works, in two and a half days.

Now, when the Air Force, uh, re- uh, reserve guys from Hill went to, uh, uh, went to Beale to, you know, to secure the SR-71C trainer, which was c- uh, conveniently called The Bastard 'cause it was made up of so many different parts from other airplanes, uh, it was just, uh, y- Arnie Gunderson was hoping to get a C-5 to move a, a Blackbird to West Palm Beach, and the Air Force told him, said, "We'll l- we'll lease you a C-5.

It's $967,000 a day plus gas." I scrounged two C-5s for eight days a piece, plus I scrounged a $100 million spy plane, the A-12 Oxcart, and, uh, I beat, uh, Sergeant Bilko as the scroungiest sergeant in the United States military.

[laughs] Uh, and that was just a fi- that was just a fun, fun part.

When we took the airplane apart, two and a half days.

Uh, we had to, we had to leave and come back.

We came back on the, uh, the 27th of October of '91 and load, uh, loaded it into, uh, Balls 21, ca- uh, code name Blackjack, uh, C-5A from the New York Air Guard.

When we rolled it in, we had about an inch and a half of clearance total on the floor rails, and we had to take the outer wheels and outer brakes off, and the wheels were like this far, three-quarters of an inch o- against off the rails, but we made it.

And the, you know, I remember we were flying from, we're going to fly from Dover.

So we drive up from Norfolk to Dover to get on a C5 Galaxy with cargo containers.

And we arrived earlier.

I forget what the situation was.

That's a lot of weight.

And then you look at the C-5, which I never flew, and the C-5 could carry 281,000 pounds.

Now, that's a lot of weight.

There are 36 pallet positions.

You could put a lot of really big stuff inside of a C-5 and a C-17 for that matter.

Like I said, I flew the C-130 and then I flew the C-17.

Rob flew the MC-130, which I don't know if it had the same carrying capacity because it carried a lot of extraneous gear.

And it's interesting, as we talked about at the outset of the show, that In smaller airplanes, you gross out before you cube out.

No, it's not.

The C-5 is really, really big.

And we have to find a way to replace the capability of the C-5, which is more than the C-17.

Now, they have a thing called the, where is this acronym? It's an Air Force acronym I had to write down because I won't remember it.

It's in the article.

It's the Large Future Airlifter.

It's an acronym.

Basically, they're trying to find a replacement for the C-17 and the C-5.

The last two weeks though, We've had a lot of big cargo planes come in on September the 1st, largest U.S. military transport plane.

The C-5 Galaxy stopped here overnight.

Long and short, Wyoming Air National Guard Base, F.E. Warren Air Force Base houses Minuteman 3s.

A lot of things move around this area.

Where they were landed, the base had been cleared of all its residual personnel the day before.

The base has large oversized hangars big enough to put 757s in because the base was originally constructed for the C-5A Galaxy, the hugest military transports around.

So the four planes were flown there.

Selected members of the crews from them and selected passengers were then offloaded from the planes and used to make the quote-unquote cell phone calls, now they could make the cell phone calls because their cell phones would now work, which they wouldn't way up in the air at cruising altitude.

That's like the brass plate donor wall.

[laughs] See, yeah, to me, I'm trying to think of, like, what would be big enough that you would need a hangar this large, and it's like, well, you're not gonna get, like, a, you know, a C-5 Galaxy in there 'cause there's no runway.

And it's like, well, that's maybe, maybe Trump, maybe he's gonna surprise us all.

Maybe the $300 million from the Treasury is actually to fund a nuclear-armed walking battle tank called Metal Gear.

Uh, and, uh, And then, of course, we're still waiting to see what happens with the future of the refueling and airlift fleets.

And I'll be looking for any clues about whether or not there's any appetite or any scope within the Air Force plans or budgets over the next several years to look at what comes after KC-46, if not more KC-46s, and what comes after C-17 and C-5, if not a restarted C-17 production line, which is a bit provocative to say, but we know that that's been in the mix for a bit.

But we'll see if that actually can come out.

It doesn't appear like there's any capacity within their budget over the next several years to address that.