Boeing 707-KC 135 and their civil and military derivatives : from the Dash 80 to the E-8 J-Stars

Although the Boeing 707 is known worldwide as the machine which took civil aviation from the piston engine era into that of the jet engine, what is very often not known is that its existence was only made possible by the success of its immediate predecessor, the KC - 135. Although these two models come from the same prototype, the Model 367-80, nicknamed `Dash 80' which first flew in July 1954, they are in fact two radically different machines sharing only a limited number of common features.