Metrea refueled German Typhoons during the Pacific Skies exercise in 2024. (Metrea)
AFA WARFARE 2025 — Far away from home and flying high above the seas for an event called “Pacific Skies” last year, a small group of three German Eurofighters made several pitstops behind KC-135 Stratotankers, helping the jet fighter notch its longest-ever flight of roughly 10 and a half hours.
It was a refueling mission like any other, except for one detail: Stratotankers supporting the flight were privately operated by the aerospace company Metrea, underscoring the growing role that commercial air refueling services can play to meet soaring demand among militaries for tanking.
“Pacific Skies was our largest and most complex deployment ever,” the German Air Force, or Luftwaffe, wrote in response to questions from Breaking Defense. Through the event, the service says it was able to “demonstrate that our Luftwaffe is able to deploy around the world.”
Founded in 2016, the American-based Metrea has quickly risen as an aerospace player, with three business groups that span air and space, electromagnetic and cyber, and digital and synthetics. Besides air refueling, Metrea’s air and space division offers other services such as supporting contractor-operated intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions in far-flung locations like West Africa.
Air refueling is a growing focus for Metrea, particularly after the company agreed last year to buy a fleet of 14 KC-135s set to be retired by the French Air and Space Forces, growing the firm’s tanker inventory to a total of 18 on top of four previously acquired KC-135s from the Singaporean government. (Five planes in Metrea’s fleet of 18 are operational now and one is undergoing heavy maintenance, with additional tankers entering service “based on customer demand,” the company said). According to Metrea, the French deal means the privately-held business now boasts the world’s fifth-largest refueling fleet, behind four countries.
“As many [KC-135s] as we can get in service in ‘25, we’re going to put them to work,” Jon “Ty” Thomas, the head of the company’s air and space group and a retired Air Force lieutenant general, said in an interview with Breaking Defense.
Globally, air forces’ “demand for air refueling is growing,” Thomas said, whether through buying more aircraft or running more sorties for an existing fleet. And having commercial tankers available could help supplement military planes thirsty for gas, Tim Walton, an air refueling expert at the Hudson Institute, said in an interview.
“Commercial aerial refueling tankers could support training, testing and evaluation and coordinate fighter movements in peacetime, which could help meet the high demand for aerial refueling services across the globe,” Walton said.
While a range of factors from budget constraints to mission needs will ultimately shape future demand for private air refueling, Walton noted that “ideally, it will increase if the government can take new approaches to aggregate different demands for training, deployment of aircraft and foreign military or direct commercial sales in support of foreign aircraft.”
A Eurofighter Record
Metrea’s highest-profile international refueling to date with the Luftwaffe for the Pacific Skies event started out at the 2023 Royal International Air Tattoo in the United Kingdom. Metrea brought along its own KC-135 fresh out of heavy maintenance, catching the eye of several potential customers, including the Germans.
Officials kept Metrea in mind, and ahead of Pacific Skies, they reached out to see “if support for our deployment would be possible,” the Luftwaffe said. While the service operates refueling assets like the Airbus A330 MRTT and A400M, as well as the Lockheed Martin KC-130 — with the A330 providing a “majority” of refueling missions for the deployment — like many nations, German armed forces are “always slightly short when it comes to bigger deployments or exercises,” the service said.
Pacific Skies is essentially a catch-all term to describe the overarching deployment of German forces to the region for a series of exercises. For the record-setting Eurofighter flight, the jets were ferried from one exercise in Japan called Nippon Skies to Hawaii for the biennial Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, exercise.
Ahead of the journey, Metrea staged one of its KC-135s at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo and another at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, paving the way to support the trans-Pacific flight to Hawaii, according to Rory Cattelan, a former KC-135 instructor pilot who helped plan the event for the company.
After rendezvousing with the Germans outside Tokyo, “we dragged them [the Eurofighters] pretty much around the Pacific Rim, staying within 600 miles of a suitable alternate the whole time,” Cattelan said. A few hours later, the first aircraft passed the last of its gas and peeled off for Wake Island, dropping into a “lovely thunderstorm,” while the aircraft from Guam carried the German jets the remaining way to Hawaii.
Und wer wissen will, wie das mit dem Tanken in der Luft an einer KC135 der Firma @MetreaAero ist, der Boss zeigt es höchst persönlich in diesem Video.
Dank an Metrea für die Unterstützung bei unserem #Weltrekordflug. Ohne Euch wäre das nicht möglich gewesen. #Pacificskies24 pic.twitter.com/xMIbZARRm4— Team Luftwaffe (@Team_Luftwaffe) July 26, 2024
“We were just nervous this wasn’t going to happen because it was really tight on gas as far as how much they needed and what we could support, and definitely didn’t want them to fail their world record flight,” Cattelan said. “In the end, it went off pretty good.”
Metrea also helped the Luftwaffe get back to Europe, the service said, providing gas between Hawaii and Guam, Guam and Malaysia, then Malaysia to the UAE. In total, Metrea says it offloaded roughly 475,000 pounds of fuel over the course of 25 sorties spanning 160 flight hours.
“I think what we proved as a company is the complexity of the mission set that we’re able to handle as a commercial entity,” said Joe Parker, a career boom operator and Metrea employee who helped execute the event. “So I think what we proved as a company could be taken as a lesson learned, but really it was more, ‘We got this,’ and we kind of put our best foot forward in that regard.”
From the Luftwaffe’s end, the experience of refueling with a commercial air refueling operator is “pretty similar” to a traditional military run, particularly since air refueling is standardized in NATO. The service was even able to hire Metrea by tapping into the company’s active contract with the US Navy, easing some of the “bureaucratic workload.”
And what did the Luftwaffe learn from the endeavor?
“That commercial AAR [air-to-air refueling] is also a valid option for future deployments,” the service said.
What Metrea Would Do During A War
Describing Metrea’s business model of providing “effects-as-a-service,” Thomas explained the company helps fill gaps that occur as part of militaries’ “daily competition,” or day-to-day activities in lower-intensity scenarios. Much of the Air Force’s tanker force structure lies in the Guard and Reserve, whose assets and personnel are not always available for daily refueling taskings. Similar problems affect other militaries as well, Thomas said, noting that’s where Metrea comes in.
“It’s not a choice of like, ‘Oh well, I could do that, or I could have a USAF tanker,” he said. “It’s, ‘I can have a commercial tanker, or I can have nothing. And so that’s how we’ve grown the market.”
Many of Metrea’s approximately 1,000 employees are either former military or a member of the Guard or Reserve. That depth of experience helps smooth operations for Metrea when serving military customers, but also provides a natural limit on what the company could provide under an all-out-war scenario.
“Probably a good fraction of our crews aren’t wearing the Metrea blue flight suit” in that event, Thomas said. “They’re wearing the United States of America and US Air Force green flight suit, because they’re Guardsmen or Reservists and they’ve been mobilized,” he added. “So our capacity is going to be constrained by the dynamics of that day.”
“We’re not going to be able to have the luxury or be willing to take the risk of, on America’s worst day, 20 of those tankers are coming out of a commercial company,” he added. “That’s not our place.”
Walton, too, expressed skepticism that commercial refueling could shape what’s ultimately required by US Transportation Command (TRANSCOM), which tasks air refueling missions and sets requirements for the fleet.
“Although it’s possible that private aerial refueling could exert downward pressure on the size of the government aerial refueling fleet, I think it’s unlikely, given that the US Transportation Command’s mobility requirements study has established a pretty high floor for the number of tankers required for the fleet in potential contingencies.” The minimum air refueling fleet number is mandated by Congress and is currently set at 466 tankers.
At the direction of Congress, TRANSCOM has also studied the issue of incorporating more commercial tanking services. The command’s analysis previously found that the current air refueling fleet is sufficient to support global operations, but that “the Air Force has and continues to explore the potential use of commercial tankers for training and other non-combat missions to help ease the pressure on the organic tanker fleet,” according to a statement from TRANSCOM.
A day will come, however, when Metrea’s fleet of Eisenhower-era KC-135s will be tough to operate, particularly as the plane becomes increasingly difficult to maintain due to diminishing sources for parts as the Air Force retires the fleet. At that point, the firm may have to pivot, Thomas acknowledged.
“The [KC-]135 ecosystem does exist. And actually, let’s be honest, the only way that it works for us is that there’s a larger ecosystem in which we operate,” he said.
“If there’s a day when the USAF isn’t operating KC-135s in quantity, we’ll have a hard choice to make as to what we’re going to do,” he continued. “But that day is like at least two decades away.”
