Thomas John Eaves, Jr.
August 12, 2022

Maj. (Ret) Thomas J. Eaves, Jr., passed away on Aug. 12, 2022, in Agoura Hills, Calif. After graduation, Tom married the love of his life, Elizabeth Clanan. They have two daughters. In Vietnam, he flew a C-47.

He briefly worked in Tehran, Iran, for EDS. The assignment was cut short due to the revolution and he and the family were evacuated.

Years later he went back into the Air Force. He flew the KC-135 until retirement.

Throughout his second Air Force tour, he received multiple awards – most notably – the Bronze Star. USAF Commander in Chief General Charles A. Horner’s letter explains why.

“Major Eaves was the single critical member that designed and built the software program that executed the Desert Storm air campaign. This operation required the largest armada of tankers in history, resulting in more than 19,000 KC-135 and KC-10 sorties, more than 76,000 receiver aircraft, and more than one billion pounds of fuel offloaded to the Multi-National Coalition Forces. The historical size of this refueling campaign required revolutionary computerized methods to plan and execute a daily Air Tasking Order (ATO) that was five times greater than ever before. At no time in the history of airpower has a tanker planner been required to mate more than 300 tankers and more than 1,500 receivers into 60 air refueling tracks in successive 24-hour periods on a continuing basis.

“Timeliness was the critical factor in the war-time scheduling process. Major Eaves’ software resulted in 99 percent savings in manhours and ATO errors. The astounding difference was immediately evident—the eight-hour planning time required to manually transfer data was reduced to eight minutes. There was no manual intervention required—thus no errors! His innovation substantially reduced the planners’ workload and greatly increased the accuracy of the Desert Storm ATO. His progress now provides the solution to the air refueling problems once considered unsolvable by previous programmers. Brig. Gen. Caruana stated that, ‘Tom has forever changed the way we will prosecute a war.’ Major Eaves’ software programs were used by Rome Laboratories as the “heart” for the air refueling algorithms of the Advanced Planning System, the future for joint service operations.

“Major Eaves was the architect who designed and built the software program which was singularly and directly responsible for the overwhelming success of Operation Desert Storm and the liberation of Kuwait. His superb performance during six months at USCENTAF Headquarters in Riyadh truly merits award of the Bronze Star medal.”                       (Elizabeth Eaves, Tom’s wife)