Fighters on Civilian airfields.

[Rule of cool]

I easily picked out 25km of roadnet between Eliwara, the mine and the nearby village. I'd guess there's probably double that by the time you look in detail. Most of that looked tarmacked, but you don't need that, it just needs to be solid enough to tow a jet along behind a tractor, and you can use matting if needed. It's a bit short of buildings large enough to conceal aircraft in, but lots of lovely pre-built berms for dispersals and ordnance and if you string camo netting over all of them it creates an immediate targetting shell game.

Why go to all that effort at a single remote, austere airstrip when there another 16 similar airfields, 4 major civilian airports and 2 RAAF bases in northern WA alone? Personally I'd be prioritising the improvement of big civilian airports of Karratha, Port Headland, Broome and Kununurra in WA and Alice Springs in the NT. If others were to be upgraded, I'd be prioritising those with that little bit of extra infrastructure like Truscott-Mungalalu or Gove before doing much to Eliwana, Ginbata and others like it.

Can you tell that I've been poring over northern Australian airports for the last few days?

 

[DWG]

Why go to all that effort at a single remote, austere airstrip when there another 16 similar airfields, 4 major civilian airports and 2 RAAF bases in northern WA alone?

If you want to do dispersed basing, part of it is creating the shell game as to which bases you're using. It doesn't take a huge amount of effort to make an airfield look like you might be using it. And if they all look like you might be using them, which one does the enemy target?

 

[Bounce]

I'm attempting to count how many of these airstrips there are north of RAAF Learmonth in WA and RAAF Townsville. I count 17, plus 4 civilian airports well equipped with taxiways etc as well as the 2 RAAF bases in northern WA.

I'm trying to count the ones in the NT and will try Qld after that, but so far it's looking like there might be several dozen.

Don't forget about RAAF Base Learmonth, it's a fully operational and maintained ghost airbase that can receive F-35s at a moments notice and there's another 2 similar from memory.

 

[Rule of cool]

I've done a survey of the airfields north of the Tropic of Capricorn that I think could handle fighters, if need be, using the limited resources at my disposal. I'm sure I've missed some and my cut-off was 5,000' and there are some quite extensive airfields in the 4-5,000' range.

Bear in mind that the Tropic of Capricorn is about the same distance as LA to New York. The distances are so great and the targets so far apart that only the longest-range platforms/weapons are adequate.

The target load for hypersonics, kamikaze drones and more conventional weapons like cruise missiles and stand-off bombs is some 59 fighter-capable airfields: 6 RAAF bases, 8 major airports, 13 minor airports and 32 austere airstrips. That's a lot of targets, even for 6,000 Shahed drone missiles.

 

[riggerrob]

Why go to all that effort at a single remote, austere airstrip when there another 16 similar airfields, 4 major civilian airports and 2 RAAF bases in northern WA alone? Personally I'd be prioritising the improvement of big civilian airports of Karratha, Port Headland, Broome and Kununurra in WA and Alice Springs in the NT. If others were to be upgraded, I'd be prioritising those with that little bit of extra infrastructure like Truscott-Mungalalu or Gove before doing much to Eliwana, Ginbata and others like it.

Can you tell that I've been poring over northern Australian airports for the last few days?

The real challenge is convincing the Australian federal gov't to plan a decade into the future and add few hundred thousand pounds or dollars every time a municipality wants to add or upgrade or re-surface a runway or taxi-way. This sort of long-term investment will build more targets than the evil, invading %$#@! can damage in a pre-invasion strike.
Add in the ocassional hard-standing and NAFFI wagon and the bad guys will be over-whelmed by the huge variety of targets to chose from.
Finally, add in regular RAAF and reserve exercises and their attendant shell-games and bad guys will soon lose count of whether ISO shipping container "A" hides vital avionics or a load of moldy old socks.

 

[Rule of cool]

The real challenge is convincing the Australian federal gov't to plan a decade into the future and add few hundred thousand pounds or dollars every time a municipality wants to add or upgrade or re-surface a runway or taxi-way. This sort of long-term investment will build more targets than the evil, invading %$#@! can damage in a pre-invasion strike.
Add in the ocassional hard-standing and NAFFI wagon and the bad guys will be over-whelmed by the huge variety of targets to chose from.
Finally, add in regular RAAF and reserve exercises and their attendant shell-games and bad guys will soon lose count of whether ISO shipping container "A" hides vital avionics or a load of moldy old socks.

It looks like the bare bones are there that would allow the 50+ civilian airports/airfields to be quickly turned into more operationally focused airbases, some more than others of course. It's also important to keep in mind that many of these airfields are so remote that they are effectively out of range of any 'action', so putting a lot of resources in upgrading these would be much less effective than upgrading better airports that are closer to the action.

The RAAF bases, while well overbuilt with redundant taxiways, extensive hardstand and irregular dispersal, are not really hardened with reinforced concrete aircraft shelters and the like.

 

[Rule of cool]

This topic has come up again, as it often does, in the context of the Falklands war rather than VTOL/STOL or other things that cause airfields to become a topic of conversation.

So, what does an airfield need to be considered fit for 'fighting', as opposed to a staging, transit or dispersal etc? I don't think purpose-built military airbases are the only option, many quite modest regional civilian airports have sufficient infrastructure to enable a reasonable number of combat aircraft to operate with reasonable intensity.

Firstly, the runway needs to be long and strong enough to handle fighters, I'd suggest 6,000' minimum for operations even though 5,000' is likely enough for secondary roles like staging and dispersal.

Secondly, there needs to be sufficient hardstand to park and easily move around a significant number of aircraft. Wideawake airfield on Ascension Island had these 2 factors in abundance, a 10,000' runway and a 1,500' x 1,000' hardstand which accessed the runway at 2 points.

Thirdly, there needs to be a way to get on-off the runway at either end (more or less), at minimum a loop if full taxiway isn't available. This is where Wideawake fell over. The waves of 6 Victor tankers landing after Black Buck had to park at the end of the runway while the aircraft behind them landed. The 6th aircraft faced 5 aircraft at the far end of the runway hoping he hit the runway close to the piano keys, the braking chute opened and the brakes worked so he wouldn't crash into the aircraft that landed before him. The British installed a loop at the far end of the runway in the 80s.

I'd suggest now that Wideawake has the minimum requirements for a fighting airfield, with the first 2 being quite generous.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Also, it would be pretty easy to add turning loops with Marston Mat/PSP even without adding them in concrete for a super-quick upgrade. Nevermind the quick-set concrete that the Seabees came up with to be flight-ready in a week from the start of pour.

IIRC, though, most airports in the world today are WW2 leftovers or upgraded from those airfields, so may already have many of the pieces needed due to that heritage.

 

[Rule of cool]

These two airports are 58km apart in northwest Western Australia. The first is Cape Preston, which in the last 2 elections billionaire Clive Palmer's party has tried to say is what the Chinese will use to establish an airhead to invade Australia. The second is at Karratha, a small and very remote city of 17,000 people.

Karratha looks like it could land a sqn of fighters tomorrow and be ready to go. In contrast Cape Preston would need significant work to handle any sort of combat aircraft operations, although it would be a good overflow strip to back up Karratha.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Yes, Karratha is a much better airbase. Needs a bigger hardstand, though.

 

[Rule of cool]

Yes, Karratha is a much better airbase. Needs a bigger hardstand, though.

I'd think Karratha would be a good candidate for dispersal revetments, scatter some planes around the place to avoid a nice juicy strafing target.

 

[EwenS]

It seems a bit of a false distinction between "fighting" airfields and those for "staging, transit or dispersal etc". How is your "fighting" airfield to be supplied if not via the "staging, transit or dispersal" fields? Overland? What about island campaigns like the Falklands? Does the country have the infrastructure to provide the supply routes into theatre?

So it starts with what kind of aircraft does your "fighting" field has to be able to handle? On the resupply front, are you reliant on chartered civilian types (or C-135, Airbus 330 MRTT etc) or military cargo aircraft capable of rough field landings (C-130, A400M etc)? What "fighting" aircraft are you intending to operate? Are they capable of rough field operation or not?

In terms of the runway, it is not just the dimensions, it is the load bearing strength. Without that in sufficient amount, it will soon begin to break up with repeated landings. Even beaches have to be assessed in advance for RAF operations of A400M aircraft.

The work carried out in 1982 at, and the limitations of, Wideawake give a clue to what you require.

With Wideawake on Ascension, that was a WW2 airfield built by the USA and reconstructed in 1966 by them to accept the heaviest transport aircraft in existence (fortunately we had the foresight to retain basing rights in time of emergency). It lacked hardstanding & parallel taxiways as it was only ever intended to handle a few hundred aircraft movements per year. That went to 250 PER DAY in April 1982. How many are you envisaging split between supply and operations.

Air traffic control
Are your facilities adequate for the number of planned movements or do they, like Wideawake, need substantial upgrades? What about air traffic control radars? Do these exist on the proposed site or do they have to be imported? Which leads back to how?

Refuelling facilities and fuel storage
What exists? Is it adequate or does it need upgrading to cope with the volumes needed for the proposed level of operations? How is that to be topped up?

At Wideawake the RE built 180,000 Imperial gallons of fuel storage and the pumps and pipelines to supply it to where it ws needed in a matter of weeks. A lot of that was contained in 30,000 gallon pillow tanks. The constant emptying and filling of those tanks under tropical sunlight gradually caused them to split and leak.Those tanks were kept topped up from tankers using the existing offshore facility.

Communications
How is your base to communicate with the outside world? Again what exists and what needs to be imported.

Accommodation and personnel needs
For how many and for how long? Are tents going to be adequate for the climactic conditions or do you need something better like prefabricated housing? What might be adequate in the Pacific or Australia, probably will be less than ideal in the Falklands or Alaska. At Ascension they ended up operating a "one in, one out" policy so as not to overload the facilities.

That leads to supplying those people with food and all the necessities of life, essential for keeping up morale. On Ascension that included the provision of, amongst other things, postal and laundry services, as well as the good old British NAAFI, an essential feature of virtually every British base and warship.

There is probably a whole bunch of other stuff I could think of but time doesn't permit just now.

 

[H_K]

So, what does an airfield need to be considered fit for 'fighting', as opposed to a staging, transit or dispersal etc? I don't think purpose-built military airbases are the only option, many quite modest regional civilian airports have sufficient infrastructure to enable a reasonable number of combat aircraft to operate with reasonable intensity.

Firstly, the runway needs to be long and strong enough to handle fighters, I'd suggest 6,000' minimum for operations even though 5,000' is likely enough for secondary roles like staging and dispersal.

Secondly, there needs to be sufficient hardstand to park and easily move around a significant number of aircraft. Wideawake airfield on Ascension Island had these 2 factors in abundance, a 10,000' runway and a 1,500' x 1,000' hardstand which accessed the runway at 2 points.

Thirdly, there needs to be a way to get on-off the runway at either end (more or less), at minimum a loop if full taxiway isn't available.

For what it's worth the fighter airfields used by French Jaguars and Mirages in Africa in the 70s-80s typically had a lot less than that.

Mostly they shared facilities with "international" airports at N'Djamena (Chad), Bangui (Central Africa), Dakar (Senagal) and Libreville (Gabon). Single runways, no parallel taxiways, most didn't have loops at the runway ends. Usually there was a dedicated military hardstand that was fairly small, typically approx 500 x 500 ft, with only 1 way in and out. On the plus side, runways were fairly long (2,600-2,800m, 8,500-9,000 ft) to accommodate civilian airliners and C-135 tankers flying in very hot conditions.. Some runways had a single emergency arrestor wire. Munitions and petrol storage was quasi inexistant. Open air maintenance, most personnel housed in tents.

N'Djamena housed 20 fighters at its peak, Bangui 16 fighters, Dakar at least 10 fighters. Add 2-3 C135 tankers, 2-3 Transall transports, 1-2 Atlantic patrol aircraft, a few helicopters, plus a few aircraft from local air forces.

Bangui just before the Ouadi Doum strike: 12 Jaguars, 4 Mirage F1s, and 2 Atlantics in the foreground, 2 Transalls in the rear

N'Djamena packed with up to 12 Jaguars + 8 Mirage F1s

Dakar: 10 Jaguars lined up

In addition, small detachments of 3-4 fighters were occasionally temporarily deployed to forward airfields such as Abeche (Chad), with no maintenance facilities and small hardstands.

Abeche forward airfield: runway lighting was inoperative, having been stolen by the locals. One pair of Jaguars landing at dusk had to ask the local ground crew to use their jeep’s headlights to light up the runway threshold!

Libreville: High density parking created risks, especially when sharing space with poorly trained local crews who might forget the brakes!

 

[Rule of cool]

@EwenS, yes the line I've drawn between fighting and others is somewhat arbitrary, but I thought it useful as a marker. The aircraft I had in mind are the common combat aircraft of the Cold War onwards; Mirage III, A4, Phantom, Mirage F1, F16, F18 etc rather than uncommon types like the Harrier or large bombers which have their own rules.

Apart from the surface LCN a lot of the other stuff you mentioned can be improvised at short notice, even by countries outside the top tier 'NATO standard'. After all Argentina managed to coordinate an impressive 10 day airlift into the very austere Port Stanley airport using radar, communications, air traffic control etc that didn't exist before they arrived a week earlier. However the extension of the runway to handle Phantoms took a long period of preparation followed by a 10 day shutdown of their airfield to do the very intensive work.

 

[Rule of cool]

@H_K the Jaguars at Bangui appear to be parked in revetments for 3, which is at least some dispersal and damage limiting protection. The other appear hideously vulnerable to any sort of attack, even infiltrators on the ground let alone an air attack.

In any case, my point was that niceties like taxiways enhance what an airbase can do, things like launch a 'flight' of fighters simultaneously and speed up the rate of operations. Without that sort of thing an airfield not only operates at a lower tempo but is vulnerable to mishaps like a C130 crashing into parked Jaguars on a packed hardstand.

 

[Rule of cool]

If Australia has a fighting airbase it would be RAAF Tindal, home to 75 sqn with F35s.

It has all sorts of handy features such as high-speed exists so fighters can get off the runway before slowing down fully, the taxiways to the dispersal are 5,000' long and straight so can be used as runways in a pinch, there are parking places for fighters on alert to quicky get to the runway and take off and the revetments are well dispersed. However, there isn't much hardening, even blast deflecting earth berms aren't ubiquitous.

The USAF has undertaken an upgrade so 6 x B52s can operate from Tindal and the base operates dozens of aircraft during exercises. It's what comes to my mind when I think of a fighting airbase.

 

[Rule of cool]

The work carried out in 1982 at, and the limitations of, Wideawake give a clue to what you require.

With Wideawake on Ascension, that was a WW2 airfield built by the USA and reconstructed in 1966 by them to accept the heaviest transport aircraft in existence (fortunately we had the foresight to retain basing rights in time of emergency). It lacked hardstanding & parallel taxiways as it was only ever intended to handle a few hundred aircraft movements per year. That went to 250 PER DAY in April 1982.

I think Wideawake is an interesting case. It's a bare bones airfield, but thanks to the USAF 1966 upgrade those bare bones are massive. About the only sophistication is had was that the hardstand accessed the end of the runway and a second point 2,700' further down the runway. I think it was this huge hardstand that allowed so many movements.

250 movements a day is a take-off or landing every 5 minutes, although this average would be stretched or highly compressed in practice. The ability to park and unload multiple transport aircraft at any one time drastically increases the number of possible movements. With a small hardstand, like Port Stanley for example only 1 or maybe 2 transport aircraft could be unloaded, so there's no point speeding up movements until there was room to unload the aircraft.

 

[Scott Kenny]

So, what does an airfield need to be considered fit for 'fighting', as opposed to a staging, transit or dispersal etc? I don't think purpose-built military airbases are the only option, many quite modest regional civilian airports have sufficient infrastructure to enable a reasonable number of combat aircraft to operate with reasonable intensity.

I would start with a fighting airfield needs Alert pads. Places for fighters to be wheels up in 5 minutes from a phone call. Then you need turning loops and/or long taxiways to get landed planes off the runway for safe operations. A large hardstand is also good, just to 1) give the cargo monkeys a place to work, and 2) keep the cargo monkeys away from the combat aicraft! If there's space, a split hardstand is even better, cargo over on the west hardstand and fighters on the east hardstand.

If the enemy is able to attack your fighting airfield you will also need revetments for refueling and rearming. Hardened Aircraft Shelters would also work but they're a very-nice-to-have not a must-have. You'd also need AA guns, SAMs, and an armed perimeter, but that can all be flown in.

 

[Rule of cool]

I would start with a fighting airfield needs Alert pads. Places for fighters to be wheels up in 5 minutes from a phone call. Then you need turning loops and/or long taxiways to get landed planes off the runway for safe operations. A large hardstand is also good, just to 1) give the cargo monkeys a place to work, and 2) keep the cargo monkeys away from the combat aicraft! If there's space, a split hardstand is even better, cargo over on the west hardstand and fighters on the east hardstand.

If the enemy is able to attack your fighting airfield you will also need revetments for refueling and rearming. Hardened Aircraft Shelters would also work but they're a very-nice-to-have not a must-have. You'd also need AA guns, SAMs, and an armed perimeter, but that can all be flown in.

Alert pads, or analogous infrastructure can often be incorporated into other things like dispersal areas. Several of the airbases Argentina used in the Falklands war were quite light on for hardstand, taxiways and the like but had their HAS and fighter hardstand at a short distance from one end of the runway so fighters could get onto the runway quickly and in numbers. Wideawake having hardstand access to the very end of the runway is another example of regular infrastructure also enabling rapid scramble if they were parked near that exit.

Several of the new (in the 80s and 90s) RAAF bare base airfields have a small hardstand at the ends of the runway to park a pair of fighters for rapid scramble.

 

[H_K]

250 movements a day is a take-off or landing every 5 minutes

Digging into the Wideawake stats I'm struggling to find more detail on those movements. A lot of those movements would have been helicopters, which are a lot easier to run simultaneously. I've seen a comment from a participant that the ratio was 5:1 in favor of helo vs fixed wing movements at one point (when they were doing 350-400 movements).

In early April at the beginning there were approx. 6-8 Hercules logistical flights per day, though this must have increased.

• 17 Victor tankers flying approx 15 sorties/day at peak.
• 2 (later 3) Nimrods flying no more than 1x sortie/day
• 3 Vulcans flying a handful of Black Buck raids
• 3 fighters (Harriers, later Phantoms)
• 3-5 Hercules based at Ascension for resupply flights to the South Atlantic (3x sorties per day in late May)
• 5 helicopters based at Ascension

Total hardstand capacity a little over 30 aircraft.

Hard to see how that adds up to 250 movements per day, let alone 350-400, except for the few days of peak actviity when there were ships in harbor operating lots of Sea King/Wessex shuttles. My best guess is the number of fixed wing movements would have been under 100 almost all the time.

 

[Rule of cool]

Once IFR probes were fitted to Nimrods and Hercules the RAF mounted a mission to the Falklands every day, all of which required extensive Victor support. I've seen the refueling plan for Hercules cargo drops to the fleet and they aren't nearly as tanker heavy as the Black Buck missions, but they still required maybe half of the available tankers to mount. I think the IFR Nimrod missions were on the scale of the Black Bucks. A Black Buck alone would account for 30+ movements and Nimrods flew 111 missions during the war war, so account for maybe 4 movements a day once they deployed and got into their tempo.

After the war, and the experience of having Victor tankers dangerously gather at the end of the runway the British installed a turning loop at about the 7,500' mark of the runway. This likely isn't as ideal as one at the very end there are some obstacles close to the runway that limit the options.

 

[Rule of cool]

Out of interest had a look on Google Maps at some of the old RAF Germany bases. While there has been significant development the outline of the Cold War infrastructure can still be seen.

RAF Bruggen and RAF Laarbruch look pretty robust with a full-length taxiway either side of the main runway and a dispersal area at each corner of the field, presumably with HAS at each one.

RAF Gutersloh is different but still pretty robust, it was the closest to the east German border and housed Harriers and RAF helicopters. It has a large semi-circle 'taxiway' with hardstands and small dispersals along it, a couple of other main runway access taxiways and a significant dispersal area on the other side of the runway. It's likely more vulnerable that the others, but it's not cookie-cutter so I have a perverse liking for it.