JOURNAL INFORMATION
About Offload
Offload is an independent aerial refueling journal: boom and probe-and-drogue methods, tanker aircraft, and how AAR missions are planned and standardized.
About Offload
Offload is an independent journal about aerial refueling, the family of techniques that let aircraft transfer fuel in midair. The journal covers three connected fields: the technology behind refueling systems, the aircraft that fly the tanker role, and the way air-to-air refueling missions are planned and standardized.
Refueling technology
The technology section explains how the two dominant methods work, the flying boom and the probe-and-drogue, along with the hardware, flight procedures and trade-offs involved in each. Articles walk through how a boom operator steers a telescoping tube into a receiver receptacle, and how a hose trailing a basket lets aircraft take fuel at their own pace.
Tanker aircraft
The tanker section follows the machines themselves, from converted bombers and airliners of earlier decades to the boom carriers and hose stations in service today. Profiles cover design choices, refueling configurations and the units that operated them.
Missions and standards
The missions section looks at how crews plan and fly refueling sorties: how tanker orbits are set up, how receivers are sequenced and topped off, and how doctrine is shared between air forces. Standardization publications such as NATO ATP-56 and professional forums like ARSAG, the Aerial Refueling Systems Advisory Group, shape common procedures, and Offload explains them in plain language.
Readers and sources
Offload is written for military aviation enthusiasts, flight-sim pilots who want their tanking procedures to ring true, scale modelers checking details, students of air power, veterans of tanker operations, and spotters who watch these aircraft come and go.
The journal works from public sources. Each article names the sources it draws on, whether official publications, standardization documents or reputable aviation media. Images prepared for this site are labeled as illustrations and are never presented as photographic evidence of a real mission.
The air-refueling.com domain once hosted a one-person software vendor known as AIRPLAN. That business is defunct and appears in these pages, when at all, only as an archive fact.
The Offload editorial team