I understand the general “how” aspect in that the planes use a special fuel line to get the fuel to the plane.
How can they do it safely with the engine on however? Thinking about refuelling a car you have to turn your engine off, when a plane/helicopter refuels mid flight they obviously have their engine on. Is there differences in how they get/store fuel that makes it safer or just differences in the type of engine?
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It’s more about total times and training than risk
There are hundreds of millions of cars being fueled by complete amateurs. There are only about 1000 aerial tankers all crewed by professionals with training on what to do if something isn’t right
If the odds of an incident while refueling a car that is on is 1 in a million and you have 100M cars refueling every day that’s 100 incidents per day or 36,500 per year!
Around the entire world there will be maybe 100k aerial refueling attempts per year, even at 10x higher risks you’re at just 1 incident per year
Danger = odds of something bad x number of attempts
Rare problems with common tasks will pop up a lot but common problems with rare tasks will still be rare
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