Airbus A310 MRTT

Updated: October 2026 – A short, gray widebody Airbus rolls across the apron, two cigar-shaped pods hang under the wings, a large door shows on the fuselage at the front left: that was the Airbus A310 MRTT. For about a decade and a half it refueled Eurofighters and CF-18s in the air, flew soldiers to deployment areas and brought the wounded home as a flying intensive care unit. This page explains how a Lufthansa passenger jet became a tanker, how to identify it reliably in photos and why it is now one of the rarities in every spotter’s archive.

What is the Airbus A310 MRTT?

The A310 MRTT is not an independently developed aircraft but a conversion of the passenger jet Airbus A310. The abbreviation stands for “Multi Role Tanker Transport”: one and the same aircraft can supply other aircraft with fuel in the air and at the same time carry people, cargo or patients. This very mix made the type interesting for smaller air forces that did not want to afford separate fleets for tankers and transports.

The starting point was used A310-300s that already had years of airline service behind them. In a first step they became the A310 MRT (Multi Role Transport): a reinforced cabin floor and a large cargo door on the left side of the fuselage. This way the main deck could be fitted with seats, pallets or medical equipment depending on the mission. Converting between these roles typically took only a few days.

In the second step the refueling equipment was added. Under each wing, far out, sits a pod with a hose reel (a “probe and drogue” system). The pods come from the Mk 32 family by Flight Refuelling, later Cobham. Extra tanks in the lower-deck cargo hold increase the fuel quantity, and refueling is controlled from a dedicated operator station behind the pilot seats. For the wings, this meant reinforcements so that they can carry the pods and the additional loads.

In total, six A310s were converted to tankers. Four went to the German Air Force, two to the Royal Canadian Air Force. You can find more about the manufacturer and its other military types on the Airbus page.

From airliner to tanker: the history

Germany: replacement for the Boeing 707

The Luftwaffe has flown several A310s since the 1990s. It began with two aircraft of the former East German airline Interflug, which joined the Flugbereitschaft BMVg (the German defense ministry’s air transport wing) in 1991 and served as government aircraft. Because the old Boeing 707s had to be replaced, the Bundeswehr (German armed forces) additionally bought used A310-304s in the 1990s that had previously flown for Lufthansa.

These aircraft with the serials 10+24 to 10+27 were converted into MRT transports. Elbe Flugzeugwerke in Dresden and Lufthansa Technik in Hamburg were involved. The first flight of a converted MRT was made in March 1999 by 10+24 “Otto Lilienthal.” The other names also commemorate German aviation pioneers: 10+25 “Hermann Köhl,” 10+26 “Hans Grade” and 10+27 “August Euler.”

With the tanker equipment, the Luftwaffe became the launch customer of the A310 MRTT. At the end of 2003, 10+27 presented itself in Dresden as the first German tanker, and deliveries followed from October 2004. By the end of 2010, all four MRTs were at MRTT standard. How Bundeswehr serials are structured is explained in the article on Bundeswehr aircraft registrations.

Canada: ex-Wardair jets for the Air Force

Canada’s Polaris fleet has a very different origin. The five A310-300s were delivered new to Wardair in 1987 and 1988 and, after the takeover in 1989, passed to Canadian Airlines International. The Canadian Forces bought them and put them into service between December 1992 and August 1993 as the CC-150 Polaris.

Two of the five aircraft, 15004 and 15005, later received the tanker equipment under the MRTT program and have been called CC-150T since. The first aircraft completed its acceptance tests in 2008. With that, Canada once again had strategic aerial refueling, which had been lost with the retirement of the CC-137 (Boeing 707) in 1997. The Polaris belong to 437 Transport Squadron in Trenton, Ontario.

Missions: from Eurofighter transfer to Counter Daesh

The first big appearance of the German tankers was a long-range transfer: on February 4, 2009, an A310 MRTT escorted three Eurofighters of Tactical Air Wing 73 “Steinhoff” from Laage all the way to Bangalore in India, with a stopover in the United Arab Emirates. Such deployments over thousands of kilometers were a core task of the type – without a tanker, fighter jets can only cover short distances at a stretch.

In the anti-ISIS mission Counter Daesh, a German A310 MRTT supplied aircraft of the international coalition with fuel over several years, first from Incirlik in Turkey, later from the Jordanian base Muwaffaq Salti (Al-Azraq). The last refueling flight of a German A310 took place in September 2020.

At least as important was its role as a flying intensive care unit. In the MedEvac configuration, the A310 offered up to six intensive care places and dozens of additional stretcher places. With it, the Luftwaffe brought wounded soldiers, but also civilian patients, from crisis and disaster areas to Germany. The aircraft were stationed at Cologne/Bonn Airport on the military side at Wahn.

The Canadian CC-150Ts went into action over Libya in 2011: they refueled the CF-18 – the Canadian version of the F/A-18 Hornet – which enforced the no-fly zone as part of the NATO operation. In addition they regularly ferried fighter jets across the Atlantic – according to the RCAF, the fuel is enough to bring four CF-18s across nonstop.

How to recognize the A310 MRTT

If you know the A310, you are already halfway there. The tanker shares fuselage, wings and tail with the passenger jet; the differences are in the details. Three steps are enough to identify it on your own or archived photos.

The cargo door on the left side of the fuselage ahead of the wing also helps. It stands out by its outline and is missing on normal passenger A310s. The gray livery is another clue – it gave the Flugbereitschaft’s “gray fleet” its name, as opposed to the white government aircraft in black, red and gold.

Feature	A310 MRTT	A330 MRTT	A310 (passenger/VIP)
Fuselage	short, stocky	long, slender	short, stocky
Fuel pods under the wings	yes	yes	no
Refueling boom at the tail	no	often yes	no
Cargo door at front left	yes	no	no
Wingtip	wingtip fence	large winglet	wingtip fence

The type is most often confused with its successor, the Airbus A330 MRTT. It has a much longer fuselage, large add-on winglets and usually a refueling boom under the tail. The four-engine Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker looks completely different. A broader overview of the world’s tanker fleets is offered by the article Identifying tanker aircraft, and transports such as the A400M are covered by the guide Identifying military transports.

The farewell: retirement from the Luftwaffe and RCAF

From 2020 things moved quickly for the German A310s. Instead of continuing to maintain the aging aircraft at great expense, the Bundeswehr relied on the multinational A330 MRTT fleet, in which Germany participates with partners and whose tankers are stationed in Eindhoven and Cologne-Wahn, among other places. After the last refueling flight in September 2020, 10+27 “August Euler” was the first to leave service in January 2021 and was scrapped. 10+24 “Otto Lilienthal” followed in May 2021 and 10+26 “Hans Grade” at the end of August 2021.

10+25 “Hermann Köhl” lasted longest. Its retirement had actually been planned earlier but was postponed once more because of the Russian attack on Ukraine. On June 15, 2022, its service with the Luftwaffe ended too – and with it the era of the A310 in the Flugbereitschaft was over.

The tasks were then divided among several successors: aerial refueling and strategic MedEvac were taken over by the A330 MRTT, transport tasks among others by the Flugbereitschaft’s two A321LRs, tactical transports by the A400M. The government fleet has meanwhile switched to the A350-900.

In Canada, the replacement by the CC-330 Husky, a military version of the A330-200, is under way. Nine Huskies replace the five Polaris; the first aircraft has been in service as a transport since the end of 2023, and newly built tanker versions follow only gradually. The Polaris 15003 was written off after a ground accident in July 2023, and the former VIP aircraft 15001 has meanwhile been retired and stands in a museum. Whether and for how long the two tankers 15004 and 15005 will keep flying, you should check currently before a targeted search.

Where you can still find traces of the A310 MRTT today

You will no longer get an active A310 MRTT in front of your lens in Europe. The type is exciting nonetheless: as an archive highlight, as a gap-filler in your type hangar and as a reason to dig into the history of the Flugbereitschaft.

Trace	Where	Note
Successor A330 MRTT	Cologne-Wahn, Eindhoven	Multinational tanker fleet, occasionally also operating over Germany
Canadian CC-150T	Trenton (Canada)	Only limited residual operations, check status beforehand
A310 ZERO-G	Bordeaux	Ex-government A310 10+21, not a tanker, but the same airframe
Photo archives	Spotter databases such as Scramble	Many shots from Cologne/Bonn and from airshows

For Cologne/Bonn, take a look at the observation deck at Cologne/Bonn Airport and the Cologne/Bonn plane spotting guide – the successors of the gray fleet take off from here today. How to find military and government aircraft in general is explained in the articles Tracking military aircraft online and Spotting government aircraft. Before you take photos at an air base, be sure to read the rules for photographing at military airfields.

Why the A310 MRTT is a spotter classic

For spotters in the Rhineland, the gray A310s were a familiar sight at Cologne/Bonn for years. Everyday subjects like these easily slip out of view until they suddenly disappear. If you have your own photos of the tankers from the 2000s and 2010s, you should therefore record them properly with date, serial and location – shots with extended hoses or from airshows are real archive pieces today.

The type is also interesting as a chapter in European tanker history. It showed that a civil widebody jet can be converted economically into a multirole tanker. Airbus took this idea up and developed it further with the A330 MRTT, which now flies with numerous air forces – in Britain, for example, via the operator AirTanker. The article on MSN, c/n and line number is also helpful for classifying airframes and conversions: with the construction number you can follow an aircraft from Lufthansa or Wardair service to its life as a tanker.

Conclusion

The A310 MRTT was a typically pragmatic military project: used passenger jets, a cargo door, two fuel pods – and there was an aircraft that could refuel, transport and save lives. The Luftwaffe used it until June 2022, and Canada is currently replacing its Polaris with the CC-330 Husky. For spotters it is thus a type for the archive and for memory, but also a good example of how much history can be packed into a single airframe.