Reconnaissance jet dumped fuel, made emergency landing at Offutt Air Force Base (2024)

An RC-135V Rivet Joint reconnaissance jet landed safely at Offutt Air Force Base Monday afternoon, shortly after dumping fuel and declaring an emergency.

The aircraft’s pilot declared an emergency at 4:55 p.m. Central time as the plane approached Offutt from the west and landed five minutes later, according to information gathered from the flight-tracking website FlightRadar24.

The plane shut off its transponder after reaching the runway so it’s not clear whether it taxied back to the hangar or was towed, said a former 55th Wing crew member who monitors the unit’s flights and uses the social media handle @MeNMyRC.

The 55th Wing’s Operations Group has not confirmed the emergency or responded to questions about the incident submitted Tuesday through the Wing’s public affairs office.

The FlightRadar24 track doesn’t indicate what time the aircraft, which used the callsign LITCH45, took off from Offutt or another location. It apparently took off without activating an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) signal, used by all aircraft to let others know their location. While commercial airline flights are required to transmit codes that are picked up by ADS-B, military flights are not.

The plane’s track first appears at 2:52 p.m. Central time over the Ute Mountain Reservation in southwestern Colorado, flying at 23,000 feet.

At 3:14 p.m., the aircrew asked for, and received, permission to dump fuel “LOCAL OFFUTT,” @MeNMyRC told The World-Herald. Fuel dumps may be carried out when an aircraft needs to land ahead of schedule to reduce its weight upon landing.

LITCH45 then flew directly to Offutt but circled several times in the Nebraska City area, perhaps to carry out the fuel dump. The emergency was declared just before landing. Air crews in difficult situations may declare an emergency in order to give their aircraft priority over others in the sky and to alert airport emergency responders.

The 55th Wing has 17 Rivet Joints in its fleet, all headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base. They deploy frequently to England, Greece, Okinawa and Qatar. In 2023, the 55th also established a detachment at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska.

The RC-135 that experienced the malfunction (No. 64-14845) was built at Boeing’s plant in Renton, Washington and delivered to the Air Force on Dec. 11, 1964. It was converted into a reconnaissance platform and has been assigned to the 55th Wing at Offutt since 1967. It received new engines in 2003, according to the third edition of “KC-135 Stratotanker: More Than a Tanker,” by Robert Hopkins III, a former RC-135 pilot.

The last previous flight recorded for the aircraft by FlightRadar24 was on June 25, when it returned to Offutt from a deployment to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, @MeNMyRC told The World-Herald. He said it may have flown tactical “real-world” missions out of Offutt in the weeks since, without using its ADS-B transponder.

Offutt’s fleet of RC-135s were all built between 1961 and 1964, though they have been upgraded since with modern engines and avionics. They are among the oldest U.S. military aircraft still flying. They are based on the same airframe as the civilian Boeing 707, which last flew for U.S. commercial airlines in the 1980s. The Air Force has no current plans to replace them.

Maintenance and safety issues involving the RC-135 were the subject of a World-Herald investigative report in 2018. The reporting showed that 55th Wing aircraft had been forced to cut short more than 500 flights because of mechanical breakdowns in the previous six years and that RC-135 pilots had declared emergencies at least 216 times during the same timespan.