When they get the urge to eat, booms fire up their airborne ovens and whip up a meal. Tech Sgt. Todd Fairfield (left) gets a few tips from Senior Airman Richard Martin on the best way to bake cookies and brownies on the KC-135R tanker.

INCIRLIK AIR BASE, Turkey — Tech. Sgt. Todd Fairfield wears a flight suit, not a frilly apron or chef’s hat.

But sometimes, between refuelings, while cruising at 23,000 feet in the boom pod of his KC-135R tanker, he gets hungry and trades his flight gloves for oven mitts.

“Nothing beats a piece of fresh-baked cake with icing on a nine-hour flight,” he said.

He’s an air-refueling troop with the 92nd Air Refueling Squadron. The unit pulled a 45-day Operation Northern Watch tour here this summer from its home base at Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash.

He’s not the only “boom” that whips up a meal in the tanker’s tiny oven. That has been a long-standing tradition among tanker troops.

It beats eating “box nasties,” what Senior Airman Richard Martin, another boom, calls box lunches. “We get creative,” he said. “And it makes the flight a lot more pleasant.”

Most tanker missions over Turkey last four to five hours. The booms make cakes and brownies from mixes that only need water. Cookies come from ready-made dough. They prepare bigger meals in advance for longer flights.

On the in-flight menu are cake, cookies, brownies, pizza, pot pies, baked chicken, potatoes and steak. And heaven only knows what other booms make, Airman Martin said.

Tanker ovens are for heating frozen meals, so they improvise. The two don’t use pots, pans, cooking utensils or carry a rack full of spices. They rely on aluminum foil and the small foil pans that come with cake mixes.

“You’ve got to be practical,” Sergeant Fairfield said. “After all, we’re not making seven-course meals.”

Airman Martin loves to refuel multimillion dollar aircraft. But he considers himself as much a skilled technician at baking in-flight cinnamon rolls.

“They give the jet a real nice aroma,” he said. “Like a flying bakery.”

by Master Sgt. Louis A. Arana-Barradas
photo by Master Sgt. Keith Reed