The new basket refueling is beautifully implemented. When you snag, a little sine wave travels down the hose. And there is a delay in the reel as you move in and out. They’ve really made it look and feel like a flexible entity. It’s considerably harder to stay within “green light” parameters than in that other sim. There’s even a spray of kerosene as you disconnect.
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Wait, but isn’t the Viper a Boom and receptacle fighter?!
It is. But since at least 4.33, BMS has included a fairly decent F18C and an equally close Av8B, plus there’s the Mirage, Su27, and a few others of progressively worse fidelity. I don’t know if AAR works with any of them but it works for the Hornet.
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I noticed in that (awesome) video that their AAR basket techniques are a lot different than mine, especially a much more positive ‘ramming’ of the basket. Now I’m wondering which is more realistic, and if everything I’ve learned in DCS is wrong… LOL!
Paraphrasing a joke-
A woman pilot istalking to another.
“You can tell a lot about how a man love by the way he performs AAR”
A pilot passing by then remarks
“well, personally first thing I do is licking the basket delicately and thoroughly, and then…”
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I prefer having 2 or 3 missed attempts, a brief transfer then losing the rag and shooting the tanker down
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To which the female pilot responds, “Then I spray him in the face as he pulls away!”
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talking aar, it reminded me 
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In one of the videos it looks like they have added a CARTS type system to some of the CFT F-16s.
This was flight tested back in 2010 on a Block 60
AFAIK it has not been bought by anyone(?) but the F-21 offered to India recently allowed both Boom and Probe AAR.
Artist concept
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Just waiting for VR, then jumping back in with both feet. Having too much fun with the Apache, Reflected campaigns, and the occasional race sim in the meantime.
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Same! I love DCS as a cockpit sim, but BMS is a Wartime Fighter Pilot Sim.
I would love to dive into BMS again, and fervently hope to do so soon, but I just have to have VR. It’s such a different level…
Playing BMS is what got me into modern fighter sims in the first place. I remember staying up late at night reading the Dash-1 and learning how to employ Mavericks and HARMs. Before that, the last modern sim I’d played was Jane’s USAF back in 1999… 
When I first installed BMS and launched a training mission, I remember looking around the cockpit of that F-16 and thinking “Yeah, I’m a fairly intelligent pilot guy, surely I can figure out how to start this up…” Needless to say, no I could not, and I’m not ashamed to say it took me a while to learn the startup flows of the Falcon (Viper!).
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I can only speak for the Harrier, but I think that generally speaking, “ramming” the basket is discouraged.
In the Harrier particularly, it is not at all impossible to rip the probe right off as it is basically bolted on.
But more broadly, the hose take up mechanism can be overwhelmed relatively easily. That (or when the take up mechanism fails) is where you see the big sine waves and probes or baskets ripping off.
Edit: You can see a bit of a stab at it here.
That thing is heavy too, couple of hundred pounds IIRC.
Lastly, while not catastrophic, the basket has a rim of what I think is just cloth of some kind to “inflate” it as it were. If you beat the crap out of the sides, the airflow around it is disturbed and the normal little figure eight the basket makes can become greatly exaggerated. And erratic.
Making you a sure hit with your flight mates when that’s the basket you are now stuck with for the rest of the Transpac! 
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Only the Harrier… Definitely no SME here…
Great post, thanks for chiming in! Love that video, it gave me an anxious sinking feeling in the pit of my gut vicariously.
Question, when you’re a flight on a transpac, and something like that happens rendering tanker unable to give or the receiver incapable of taking, is there always another option such as a divert field or alternate tanker option out there somewhere?
Or are there certain points and circumstances where you must have a successful AAR, or swim? (AAROPS, just like ETOPS, Haha!)
Obviously wartime might be different, but I’m thinking in normal relative peacetime operations.
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That’s actually a very interesting discussion and something I never even thought of until I did it.
When we got dragged from MCAS Yuma to MCAS Iwakuni we flew Yuma to Hawaii to Guam to Japan. On the way back it was Japan to Wake Is. to Hawaii to Yuma.
We flew behind KC-10s. I’m honestly not sure that you could do this behind a KC-130 or something like it…too slow and too little gas.
In any case, the tanker will always have at least one other hose. The receiver is really the bottleneck and that’s the interesting part.
The Air Force tanker guys do a great job at planning. They will plot your entire route and, just like ETOPS, will have enroute alternates for the entire leg when within the range of the aircraft it’s dragging. And divert headings to at least get you closer to nearest land when outside this range.
Obviously, that’s a big deal. By air, you will need to be within helo range to get picked up, and that’s maybe a couple hundred miles. Outside of that, you are going to be waiting for a sea rescue.
For quite awhile.
For that reason, tankers will try to drag their chicks near shipping lanes, in the hope that someone already in the area might be available to help.
The other thing that the tankers do that made perfect sense to me only in retrospect has to do with when you tank. Logically, my first thought was that the receivers would tank as their tanks ran low, perhaps with a safety margin considering the consequences.
But what they actually do is much smarter. The goal for tanking is to keep the aircraft able to divert to a land base for as long as possible. So you tank less at the beginning and end of a long overwater segment and more in the middle. At the mid point, you might be tanking almost continuously. So if someone snaps off their probe they are always in a position to get optimally to or at least nearer land.
Every minute you get nearer to land at 250kts is a lot less that a ship has to travel to come get you at 25kts.
The tankers themselves may even have tankers of their own, depending on the circumstances. And each tanker may be limited as to how many aircraft they can drag, depending on distance.
It’s a pretty involved meta process and the AF guys are pros at it. They took great care of us as we gaggled “single seat, single engine, and single malt” over an ocean that you really don’t appreciate the size of until you entertain the possibility of floating in it in your little taco of a survival raft.
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Who, me?
At least in the Harrier.
I find, in VR, AR to be pretty easy in all BUT the harrier. Yeah, practice for sure. Currently it ends up in a jousting match. I blame it on a lack of peripheral vision; I turn my head to see it and, well, things tend to go all pear-shaped fast.
If my latest sessions had subtitles: “Breath, back off…where is it? No, don’t look it in the eyes!..but where it is it??”. Guess it’s a feel thing, or needs to be in this context.
Satisfying when I do get it.
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Ha, no that’s the same in real life! I remember coming back from my first tanking hop in the RAG and I could barely stand. I had spent the last hour with my calves locked from standing on the brake pedals in the Harrier*.
*which does nothing, but it didn’t keep me from pressing them.
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It’s like the designers said: “What? Make it easy? Where’s the sport in that?”
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@Deacon211 can I PM you with a couple of questions? At least once I figure out how to PM someone. Don’t want to clutter this thread
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