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It was the year of fire...the year of destruction...the year we took back what was ours.
It was the year of rebirth...the year of great sadness...the year of pain...and the year of joy.
It was a new age...It was the end of history.
It was the year everything changed.
At lot of back of a fag packet take off/landing performance calculations going on here. Please stop.
No accounting for non test pilot/ ISA conditions. No factoring. There is good reason things are not done to the absolute minimum runway requirement. There is theoretical and there is reality.
Most modern fighters can do lots spectacular things, but doing them burns through fuel, brakes, engines, pilots nerves and local goodwill like nobody's business.
Most military airfields are out in the middle of nowhere and have bloody huge runways, and that not something that either happens by accident, or because someone is getting a kickback from a tarmac company....
Most military airfields are out in the middle of nowhere and have bloody huge runways, and that not something that either happens by accident, or because someone is getting a kickback from a tarmac company....
Many of those military airfield you refer too where designed for 1st generation jet aircraft which did required extremely long runways. Some have even earlier histories take RAF Coningsby, this got its long paved runways to enable it to operate the Lancaster bombers, the heavy bomber of the time. Later came Camberra and Vulcan aircraft, and today it is home to Eurofighter Typhoos; do they need that size of runway, no.
Could Grippens fly out of our regional airports, the answer would be yes; the runways at those airports are longer than the road strips in the BAS90 system for which the aircraft were designed. Is is desirable that is a different question.
We are talking if and it is a big if we ever did get a force of Grippens we would all prefer to have them operate out of a more suitable airbase. IMHO Baldonnel would not be suitable due to the large population around it, SHN would be the better choice. This we have discussed at length many times.
There has been a discussion about range and how far an aircraft would have to fly, and it is not as big as many think.
The best I could find to illustrate is the following link: https://notaminfo.com/irelandmap
There are three things I think are getting a bit mixed:
(a) Irish sovereign airscape, the 12 mile limit.
(b) Irish controlled airspace, that which is under the control of the Shannon FIR.
(c) EEZ, this has no relation to airspace, at least not yet.
So basically we are concerned with the first two and what the sharp eyed will notice is they do not always match. That is because ATC like to have straight lines. So not all Irish control airspace is Irish sovereign airspace, there are parts of NI airspace in the Shannon FIR. And on the other side not all Irish sovereign airspace (most off Donegal) is within the Shannon FIR (It is similar with the SAR areas).
Now I am not saying that this airfield in its current state is suitable for "Fast Jet" operations, but it shows that if they wanted to build a new base on the west coast they could.
It was the year of fire...the year of destruction...the year we took back what was ours.
It was the year of rebirth...the year of great sadness...the year of pain...and the year of joy.
It was a new age...It was the end of history.
It was the year everything changed.
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