Timothy wrote:
Has this been on here yet?
No, but I’ve seen it elsewhere… Many years ago we had an ex Swiss airforce Vampire (or Venom, can’t tell the difference) based at our airport. A private pilot had bought it at an auction. After he did a similar thing to one of the taxiways, his plane was banned from the airport. And I guess the repairs to the taxiway were a lot more expensive than what he paid for the aircraft.
Shouldn’t runways in good condition be immune to this kind of jet blast?
Haha! You will hardly find any runways in “good condition” in the UK GA airfield scene…
MedEwok wrote:
Shouldn’t runways in good condition be immune to this kind of jet blast?
In principle yes. But the exhaust gases are very hot and directed towards the ground. Also these are single spool turbojets which produce a very fast and very hot exhaust stream. They have been out of production for half a century, so the infrastructure is not longer required to be able to cope with that…
Halfpenny green has been on the decline since I started flying in early 2000 and probably a lot longer, I can’t recall any major maintenance carried out on the runways.
Runway 10/28 and runway 04/22 have been NOTAMed unlicensed for quite a while now. 04/22 and 10/28 were OK for you average c152 /pa28, obviously not ok for a vampire.
It appears that the vampire "blew” off the top layer of asphalt maybe 40mm thick, I’ve heard that the foundations of the runways are solid it just the top surface which is degrading after so many years.
I hope they manage to get in repaired, it’s a great airfield to fly from and learn from with 3 runways so your hardly ever grounded due to cross wind, and lots of glass g airspace about. But I fear we may never get 10/28 back .
Looks like every runway I ever landed on in the UK. At Elstree before they did it up, you basically had to land between the loose boulders strewn across the rwy. It was insane.
Some tarmac runways are in a poor condition. Usually it is a symptom of the people based there not getting on together, so nobody wants to do anything about it. Or the people using it have no security of tenure so they don’t want to spend money, and the owner doesn’t either. I think Elstree – a very bad example – was one such. However there is also a “UK sub-culture” whereby any airfield charging more than about £10 gets slagged off on the UK chat sites and boycotted by many pilots, which doesn’t help with their income.
The airfields which charge a bit more, say £20-30, are generally good. For example Shoreham where I am based has a very well maintained tarmac. Basically all the IFR capable airfields are AFAIK good, and so are most of the others. It is the “cheap” ones which are sometimes in a poor condition – as one would expect.
Peter wrote:
It is the “cheap” ones which are sometimes in a poor condition
I would say this is way beyond poor condition. It looks like it’s just a thin layer of paper on top of the concrete, LOL. I have seen similar things when I was in the Air Force, but that was due to engine testing with full afterburner for prolonged times. Sweden used to have stretches of ordinary roads all over the country side for fighters to use as field strips (maybe they still have some left? ) Viggen with full afterburner is orders of magnitude more destructive than the hair dryer blast from that ancient piece of flying machine.
I was there Saturday, the day before, and saw the Vampire doing it’s thing.
I was pretty appalled by the state of the main runway that was in use .
