{"id":447533,"date":"2026-06-07T04:00:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T18:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/simpleflying.com\/worlds-largest-air-forces-number-transport-aircraft\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T04:00:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T18:00:20","slug":"the-worlds-largest-air-forces-by-number-of-transport-aircraft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/?p=447533","title":{"rendered":"The World&#8217;s Largest Air Forces By Number Of Transport Aircraft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When it comes to which air forces have the largest transport fleets, the <span class=\"display-card-hyperlink display-card-hyperlink-no-vignette\" data-id=\"306101\"style=\";  ;\" class=\"display-card-hyperlink display-card-hyperlink-no-vignette\"><a href=\"https:\/\/simpleflying.com\/tag\/united-states-air-force\/\"  >United States Air Force<\/a><\/span> dominates. The country&#8217;s fleet of C-5M and C-17 may look in a similar league to Russia, but on closer examination, the gap widens massively. All US tanker aircraft (KC-46As, KC-135s, KC-130s) have a secondary transport role, as do the tankers in service with European and other Allied air forces. Meanwhile, Russia has very few tanker aircraft, and the number of transport aircraft (Il-76s, An-124, Antonov turboprop series) in operational service is lower than nominal inventory numbers suggest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Calculating the number of transport aircraft each air force has is incredibly complicated, although the USAF is the clear winner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[396,5549,1328],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aircraft","category-c-5-galaxy","category-united-states-air-force"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=447533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":447538,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447533\/revisions\/447538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=447533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=447533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=447533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}