This Air Force General Wants a Cloaking Device for His Aerial Tankers
- ‘Star Trek’ technology wanted by general to protect his planes
- Pilot shortage also a top concern for Air Mobility chief
A Boeing Co. KC-135 Stratotanker.
Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
The U.S. Air Force’s military transport chief is tapping Silicon Valley, the defense industry and the Pentagon’s new innovation office in search of electronic cloaking technologies out of “Star Trek” to shrink the profiles of aerial tankers on enemy radar.
“I’ve got airplanes with big fat bodies and long wings,” General Carlton Everhart, head of the Air Mobility Command, said Tuesday in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. “I’ve got first-generation tankers refueling fifth-gen fighters. The enemy doesn’t have to look for the fighter -- he just has to look for me.”