Air-to-Air Refueling: A Comprehensive Overview about the State of the Art

Abstract

Air-to-air refueling is the process of transferring fuel from one aircraft to another during flight. It is a highly demanding task and often a key enabler for military missions. Air-to-air refueling is also inherently dangerous due to the close proximity to another aircraft, the high task performance standards and the pressure on the pilot who has only a limited time window to refuel his receiver aircraft. Pilot augmentations systems and partial or full automation can be a further step to increase mission performance for long-range flights and has the potential to mitigate the risk for the aircrew as well. It is also one further step towards refueling of unmanned aerial vehicles. Project LUBETA covers technologies for assisted and fully automatic air-to-air refueling. A first step in this project is a comprehensive literature review covering the state of the art regarding procedures, technologies and flight test approaches. This report is written in the frame of work package 2.1 of LUBETA and covers the abovementioned aspects.