Just an interesting thing:

There have been several posts above mentioning Tinker AFB, which is part of the OKlahoma City metro area. TAFB is a huge maintenance base/depot, as well as home of the AWACS and quite a few tankers, etc.

Oddly enough, if you look at a map you will find that Oklahoma City is pretty close to the geographic center of the USA. We are land locked, not near the ocean.

Having said that, Tinker has a a pretty good sized US Navy operation based there.

The US Navy TACAMO (Take Charge And Move Out) aircraft is the E6 Mercury derivative of the -135 planes (The tankers, the Rivet Joints, E-8, and some others are all based on that basic plane platform, so they all look pretty much alike.) This Navy group is based in TAFB.

The job of the E6 TACAMO is to communicate with our submarines around the world, especially the Boomers. They fly out of TAFB (and there are always a few temporarily based around the US for redundancy in case of attack), and usually out over the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf waters to send the messages out and do their job.

I always get bit of a kick when I ask someone the trivia question, can you tell me if the US Navy has a good sized detachment based in Oklahoma? No one ever considers the planes, just the ships. Anyway, pretty cool.

So, if you're around OKC and you see the KC-135 tankers coming and going, and some that look similar but are not tankers, they're probably the TACAMO jets.


And, just FWIW, of all things and places, the US Coast Guard has a training center in Oklahoma City. It's my understanding that other than Cape May, the OKC Coast Guard training center is either the largest or supposedly most important USCG installation after Cape May.

Yah, go figure, landlocked Oklahoma had Navy Folks as well as Coast Guard Folks wandering around here, and nothing but a few lakes and a bunch of farm tanks (ponds) to get their feet wet in, lol.
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quote:

Originally posted by OKCGene:
....Yah, go figure, landlocked Oklahoma had Navy Folks as well as Coast Guard Folks wandering around here, and nothing but a few lakes and a bunch of farm tanks (ponds) to get their feet wet in, lol.
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A few other Oklahoma City notes. I worked at Will Rogers World Airport for 12 years. The Border Patrol trains their helicopter and fixed wing pilots at OKC. The U.S, Marshals have a hanger here. The Federal Transfer Center is on airport (1,100 inmate capacity where they transport inmates around the country, the real life Con Air). And of course the FAA trains all of the Air Traffic Controllers at OKC. Lots of aviation going on here.