Airlift to Afghanistan: An Invisible Bridge

ABOARD FLIGHT REACH 4060 – At a cost of $44,351 an hour, this venerable leviathan of a C-5 cargo plane has struggled off a South Carolina runway bound for Afghanistan, some 17 hours away, carrying a cargo of two.

The payload consists of two very heavy armored trucks, known as MRAPs (Mine Resistant, Armor Protected vehicles). They are built specifically to resist the blast of roadside bombs, the main killers of American troops in Afghanistan. The huge trucks, each weighing 60,000 pounds, are lashed with webs of 25,000-pound test chain to the steel-plate deck of the C-5's enormous cargo hold. There's room in here for another three MRAPS, but even the C-5, largest cargo plane in the Pentagon's inventory, couldn't lift them. As it is, we carry barely enough fuel to make it up the coast to Bangor, Maine, to gas up for the next leg.

Only the United States can – and perhaps only the United States would – choose to fight a long-distance war by air. Especially a war in Afghanistan, a landlocked country accessible only by barely improved goat paths across tortuous mountain passes where laboring convoys are regularly set upon by insurgents and brigands.

That leaves the skies.


With little notice, the United States has established an unprecedented air bridge to Afghanistan. This aerial artery carries an unending stream of troops, munitions, ammo, water, concertina wire, tires, MRAPs, filing cabinets, relocatable buildings, porta-potties, cash, computers, rations, fresh blood and everything else needed for a long military campaign. Return trips bring out the dead and the injured: since 2001, roughly 135,000 wounded patients have been airlifted home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The numbers that describe the "air bridge" to Afghanistan are staggering, in part because the effort is almost invisible. Painted a dull, battleship gray, the airlifters – huge C-5s, the more modern C-17s with their lower cargo capacity but shorter takeoff and landing requirements, along with fleets of aerial refueling tankers -- drone out of two major East Coast ports, at Dover, Del., and Charleston, S.C., with little fanfare. They are hardly the glamorous jets the Air Force uses in recruiting ads.

Long-haul airlifters like Reach 4060 haul 350 tons of cargo and 360 troops into Afghanistan every day from the United States. Most of the MRAPs and other heavy cargo go by sea (a container ship can carry 400 C-17-loads of stuff). Still, airlifters have flown 4,189 MRAPs to the war zone despite the airfare (which I figure at $376,983.50 apiece).

That's only the stuff from the continental United States ("CONUS," in mil-speak). Cargo planes are starting to haul stuff from Iraq up to Afghanistan now: so far, 9,305 tons of cargo and 1,434 passengers, as of the end of July, according to the U.S. Air Force's Air Mobility Command, its airlift headquarters. All that flying requires fuel, of course, so there are tankers up there for aerial refueling, flying 45 to 50 sorties every day to gas up all those airplanes.

"You put boots on the ground, they need supplies and airlift goes up. The enemy has been pretty strong so our aero medical (evacuation) flights have been stressed, and we're flying a long way to do refueling of the air bridge,'' Gen. Arthur Lichte, the four-star Bronx-born veteran pilot who heads the Air Mobility Command, told me. "We just haven't seen a lull.''

On the contrary: President Obama's "surge" of 21,000 troops into southern Afghanistan has stressed the air bridge, making Kandahar air base in southern Afghanistan the busiest single-runway airport in the world (recently surpassing London's Gatwick).

"We are managing best we can," says Brig. Gen. Randy "Church" Kee.

Kee pilots the C-130, a smaller, more versatile cargo plane capable of operating in tight quarters -- Kee flew combat runs into Sarajevo during the siege in the Balkans. Now he is vice commander of the Tanker Airlift Control Center at Scott AFB in Illinois, which orchestrates the maddeningly complex web of tanker and airlifter flights worldwide.

"The surge continues," Kee told me. As far as airlifting stuff into Afghanistan goes, "we're not done by a long shot.''

The airlift of MRAPs will accelerate this fall as a new version of the vehicle, engineered specifically for Afghanistan, rolls off the production lines. Loading them on for a flight is no snap. The vehicles are so heavy that their precise placement inside the fuselage is critical to avoid tipping the giant aircraft forward or back. Tech Sgt. Andy Cavanaugh, 38, primary load master for this C-5, is fussy about it.

"Ya never want to be nose-heavy,'' he shouted as the vehicles growled up the ramp into the plane's vast hold that seems a football-field in length. "But ya don't wanna smash the tail into the ground, either.''

Cavanaugh is a police officer in private life, in Dalton, Mass. Along with the others in this 10-man crew (including three pilots for this long-range flight), he is an Air Force reservist who volunteers for airlift flights. Like a cop at an accident scene, Cavanaugh is patient and careful in placing the vehicles. He measures, squats, squints, does "a nightmare of math.'' Then he orders 120,000 pounds of MRAPS moved forward. Twenty inches.

All this work is in essence a race against time, for the aircraft are getting older and the high tempo is wearing them out fast. The typical C-5 is more than 30 years old; the workhorse aerial tankers, the KC-135s, are almost 49 years old on average. Inevitably, despite meticulous maintenance, things go wrong. The C-5 designated Reach 4060, for instance, left its home base at Westover AFB in western Massachusetts five hours late due to an elevator relay problem. En route to Charleston the plane lost cabin pressure and the crew quickly donned air masks and dropped to a lower altitude. They landed to find a strut had broken, which took another five hours to fix.

The 10-hour delay meant that Kee, back at the Tanker Airlift Control Center, had to rearrange other flights' arrivals and departures to keep planes from jamming up along the air bridge. Every air base has space for only a certain number of planes, its "maximum on ground,'' or "MOG.'' When an air base reaches its limit, it is "mogged out,'' and inbound planes have to be diverted elsewhere.

Back at Charleston, the broken strut is fixed, Cavanaugh is loading his MRAPs – and a thunderstorm rolls in. Flight delay. Just as the skies clear, a fire-detection warning light winks on; the system has to be checked and fixed. The crew decided it can fly to Dover for the repair. Maj. Phil Chestnut, 36, is the normally genial aircraft commander and at this point, he is fed up. He stands on the flight deck, fists on hips, quietly fuming.

He's just gotten word: Dover is mogged out. Reach 4060 is stuck. Suddenly a C-5 technician appears from a neighboring plane. "Here's a trick I learned from a guy,'' he said. He unplugs the suspect part, turns the system off, waits 30 seconds, inserts the part back in and powers up (rebooting!)

Problem fixed. "It's always something,' Chestnut murmurs as he settles into the pilot's seat. The air bridge resumes.