Aerial Refueling with a Drone – In the cockpit with the first aircrew ever to refuel in flight from an uncrewed tanker

At 12:46 pm CT on the afternoon of June 4, 2021 pilot Lt. William “Krieger” Peabody and naval flight officer Lt. David “Poon” Babka did something no one else had done. They plugged their VX-23 F/A-18F’s refueling probe into a basket trailing from a prototype version of the U.S. Navy’s ground-breaking uncrewed tanker, the Boeing MQ-25 Stingray. Three hundred twenty pounds of JP-5 flowed from an Aerial Refueling Store (ARS) pod mounted under the prototype,...