Max,

Further to "Phormer's" comments, in the USN the supply train to a deployed
carrier is bit more tenuous than that to a fixed USAF land base.
Replenishment assets are more useful when slinging beans, bombs, mail, and
movies to the carrier than high cube drop tanks.

However, back when carriers had a SIOP mission, drop tanks were definitely
expendable when installed on those assets (A-6s in my day) tasked with such
work.

--
Mike Kanze

"All men see in only 16 colors, like Windows default settings. Peach, for
example, is a fruit, not a color. Pumpkin is a vegetable. We have no idea
what mauve is."

- Rules From Guys


"Phormer Phighter Phlyer" wrote in message
news:1112451136.d280a24e6684e201f6f44e9f90d6c4bc@t eranews...
Max Richter wrote:
Hallo,
i wonder how common is it, to really drop your droptanks in an combat
situation.
And if you do it, will somebody be upset that you lost these "valuable
peaces of equipment"?

I ask this because i was in the early eighties in the 42nd Materialdepot
of the German airforce and had to store several 600gallon F4 tanks. But
i never had to hand out one. But i think in an combat situation we would
have run out of these pretty fast.
Bye the way: next morning after storing these tanks i got my picture
with the headline " the Depot ist storing rockets" in the local
newspaper.
From outside of the fence you could see the fins of the tanks through
the wooden frames of their containers.
This was in a time where there were protest aginst nuclearweapons
(Pershings and so on) in Europe.
The local politics ran wild and we found it really funny. So far for
good journalism.

Greetings Max



In the USN, we generally didnot plan on dropping tanks in the F-4 or the
F-14..do that a few days and you will be out of tanks. A F-4 w/o a CL has
some pretty short legs and cannot make a 1 and 45 cycle...


For the USAF tho(I had an exchange tour in the F-4D, 61st TFS), we trained
and talked about getting rid of the things all the time but 'back home'
there was a warehouse full of tanks.