For crews on Air Force KC-135 tankers, parachutes are not an option

The crew parachutes came out of the U.S. Air Force KC-135 flying members of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's entourage during his 1959 visit to the United States. It would have been awful public relations, after all, if an emergency forced the U.S. crew to bail out while leaving Soviet passengers behind to die in a crash. The crew didn't care, pilot Bill Lusk said, because they knew parachutes are about as useful in a KC-135 as they are on a submarine.

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