The RAF’s fleet of strategic airlift C-17A Globemaster IIIs has been the key to most of the RAF’s operations since its entry into service. Ben Stanley Hall looks at the current state of play as well as its history in service
It’s fair to say that the RAF’s small fleet of eight C-17s, operated by 99 Squadron at RAF Brize Norton, are a busy and stretched fleet. With over 156,000 hours under their belt since entering service in 2001, that equates to each airframe flying for almost 900 hours per year – the equivalent of the whole fleet completing over 2,000 laps of the earth.
At the time of writing (early July), it is understood that of the eight airframes, three of them, ZZ172, ZZ174 and ZZ176 are undergoing maintenance at RAF Brize Norton and haven’t flown since March 13 (ZZ172), April 14 (ZZ176) and May 24 (ZZ174) respectively. Another, ZZ177, has been at Lackland AFB, Texas, since February, presumably on heavy depth maintenance. ZZ173 is on deployment to Darwin, Australia, in support of the RAF’s participants to Exercise Pitch Black 24. ZZ171 recently returned from a month in the United States on June 28 and has since joined ZZ175 to be designated training airframes. This left ZZ178, the younge…
