I just learned that during the Cold War, lots of portions of roads and highways were built in such a way to be used for air operation or to act as auxiliary military bases.
Heard that this is somehow a myth when it comes to the US, it's possible that the federal highways can be used as runways in certain areas, but they were not designed specifically with that in mind. The pavement used on interstate highways is too unreliable between states and cannot properly handle the load of heavy laden aircraft on a regular basis for this to really be a viable form of transport. It can be done, but it would cause damage to the aircraft and the road surface as well.
And Sweden designed a lot of its roads to use for launching fighters in case of emergencies.
Any other countries that done this and/or still do it?
Can't think of any modern examples, but the Autobahn was made with that in mind, iirc.
Thomas Davis
I dont know much on use for aircraft, but the highways had military value for transporting weapons. They wanted roads wide enough to transport shit like tanks and nuke missles around the country.
Jackson Lopez
There's little to no way any roads in my area would be suitable for this. Maybe for an emergency landing where you're already fucked and don't care if the gear gets eaten by a gaping crater of a pothole.
Mason Barnes
>sweden Not that many tho. As soon as you're on one of those roads u can tell by the design and they aren't common at all from my experience
Eli Johnson
lol are you from louisiana too?
Brandon Gomez
I'm sure there are a number that may have been originally but haven't been maintained to that level. It honestly doesn't take that long to build an air strip. everything else you need can be trucked in and the strip can be up and running in about a month. Less if you really want to throw money at it.
Parker White
That's why Hawaii has interstates, they connect(ed) milltary installations.
Robert Sanchez
Of the top of my head, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, North Korea, Taiwan and Belarus
Around 100 independent ones was built, but adding to that was also the 3 - 4 reserve takeoff runways each fully uppgraded Bas 90 airbase had. Not all of those were completed tho.
Isaiah Bennett
America funded the building of roads in allied countries via NGOs. There are highways good enough to accommodate landings of cargo planes.
Zachary Jones
Estonia too when I think about it
Jack Ortiz
What do you think the road to the main gate at Ramstein is?
Xavier Brooks
Yep, that's why Hawaii and Alaska have "interstate," highways. It's not called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act for nothing.
Christopher Wilson
(not related, they're indians trying to see if it's suitable for emergency landings)
Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Austria,... Lebanon as well, due to their airports getting wrecked semi regularly by all the assholes in the region.
i heard the military has priority and have the legal authority to shut everydown except civilians
Levi Gomez
It's totally true in Singapore. the government is open about it, look at it on a map. there are 5km stretches of freeway where the streetlights, trees, barriers etc. are all in containers, so soldiers can come in and clear everything to the side in half an hour.
This is in addition to shit like all the MTR stations being 40m underground to act as bomb shelters (the city is nearly at sea level), and the Marina Bay was recently walled off and dredged to make it fill up with freshwater for drinking in case of a war with Malaysia (who currently supply SG's drinking water). The whole island is a stealth fort.
>rina Bay was recently walled off and dredged to make it fill up with freshwater for drinking in case of a war with Malaysia (who currently supply SG's drinking water). The whole island is a stealth fort. but how will ships use the port? also by dredge do you mean pump out the water ?
Christian Ross
yes this is a convertible highway. the pic shows one direction of the road, the centre greenstrip on the right can be removed.
>Any other countries that done this and/or still do it? Switzerland designed parts of its national Autobahn grid to act as landing strips. Of course they went a bit further than other nations and built secret underground aircraft caverns next to the designed road strips (20 x F-5E or Mirage jets, structure built to withstand a direct multi Megaton hit). And that was additionally to all the regular hardened air bases they had.
Not the whole Autobahn my friend. They build several emergency strips on purpose though but the Autobahn in general wasnt built to serve as air strips
Nicholas Adams
>built to withstand a direct multi Megaton hit Turn the volume down, mountain jew. Even Kiloton range hardening is tough enough. There aren't even ANY buildings on earth that could survive multi-megaton bullseye hits
Bentley Stewart
marina bay isnt open to major shipping any longer. its been turned into a reservoir
Alexander Stewart
Where is this from?
Jaxson Edwards
you are technically correct but, if you read his message; these are subterranean hangars
Hunter Moore
Even if they are subterranean hangars. This aint no mile deep coal mine. They need to have (lol HANGARS) huge doors that are tough to seal against the blast wave of a nuke. Also you might have noticed that lots of "real" nuke shelters are more or less buildings on coil springs inside caverns. Thats because the vibrations of a nuke, even if miles away, can and will pulverize everything thats inside the shelter. Are those swiss "Multi-Megaton-hardened" hangars built on coil springs? If no, nothing inside will survive - even if the blast doors would
Christopher Green
stfu you dumb fucking whore. nobody wants to argue with you for the sake of argument. there are several locations around the world with blast proof hangars within mountains.
Hudson Carter
somewhere in korea
Caleb King
Yeah, the still do it in Poland
Aiden Barnes
Loly stay mad mountain jew. Still these buildings are not hardened against multi megaton direct hits.
Also: Nobody ever attacked you because you're pretty worthless
Hunter White
Its still in use by 10+ nations
Jeremiah Jones
Having driven the great plains quite a bit between home and school, I80 between Lincoln, NE and Denver, CO. It's statistically the straightest stretch of road in America.
Austin Miller
The port is on the other side of downtown from marina bay. Also the bay was full of weeds and mud and stuff, they replaced that with nice white sand that won't fuck up the water, then pumped it dry and let it fill back up from river outflow
Brody Powell
I lived in Switzerland for a couple of years, pretty much all apartment buildings and major city buildings have reinforced bomb/fallout shelters in the basement level. Supposed to be enough to fit the entire population (~8million)
My friend doing his mandatory service in the Swiss army says there are artillery emplacements in the mountains disguised as chalets and pre-drilled holes in major bridges and roads so they can blow it up with TNT in war time to deny enemy avenues of approach if need be.
Brandon White
All of those things exist here in Sweden too. Unfortunatly we only have shelters for about 8 million people, wich is kinda bad when your population just crossed the 10 million mark
Robert Scott
That's fine, that can easily fit all the refugees.
correct, those hangars are built within mountainsides and have 800m+ solid rock on top of them.
Juan Morales
All charges has been removed by the end of 2014. Most pre-drilled holes have been removed too not to make terrorists job too easy. All anti-tanks cannons have been mothballed then dismantled. Nuclear fallout shelters are not mandatory anymore.
The thing is the road runways don't need to last that long. If the US military is so desperate for runways in CONUS that they are using roads chances are they are being swept in huge offences and the aircraft will probably relocate to a new strip of road multiple times a week.
Wyatt Moore
>Any other countries that done this and/or still do it?
Finland.
Also, all strategic bridges have places for demolition charges ready.
I don't know about planes being too heavy, there are trucks that are tens of tons heavier and probably have similar surface pressure on the roads. And if you really wanted to, it's just a question of slightly more money to get more cheap materials to build a stronger road. I don't think they'd tell the truth about capability anyway.
Josiah Ramirez
Used to be a lot more, the concept has been pretty much abandoned except as emergency runways in immediate area of the Air Force bases.
Michael Jones
and what happens when a nuke detonates right outside the hangars blast doors? checkmate mountain jews
Mason Reyes
Your understanding of underground fortifications is lacking. It's not just a steel door in the side of a mountain, i am pretty sure like all other blast proof underground installations it's built with blast wave redirection and a U or pass through tunnel with inner secondary blast doors and blast diffusion around the entrances.
Colton Wright
>Unfortunatly we only have shelters for about 8 million people, wich is kinda bad when your population just crossed the 10 million mark Not to worry, the useless people in society doesn't really know what a bomb shelter is. And most of the people in the countryside are well out of range of any targets that might be bombed. (Unless they are unlucky enough to live next to a underground military facility that is)
Caleb Peterson
That plus cold war soviet nukes are not exactly precision weapons. The Swiss did build indeed several large bunkers to withstand nukes and several are still in use, some by the government, some by private companies who run safe storage/data centers in decommissioned bunkers.
Asher Hernandez
>build multi-million dollar air force >drive it around on roads instead of flying in the sky Sounds like a recipe for defeat if you ask me
Angel Morales
>Swedcuck likes having Africans rape him and his people out existance Your probably not even Swedish Moshi.
Jayden Myers
I am a Swede, and I hate the current immigration policy as much as the next guy, but that doesnt belong on Jow Forums. Every thread where Sweden is mentioned allways ends as a burnwing trainwreck if we let Jow Forums and leftypol go against each other unopposed.
Eli Fisher
yeah They decommissioned them in the 90s Last time they actually landed on the Autobahn was in the late 80s.
Jaxon Miller
If martial law is declared they could shut it down to everything
They'll use/improve non-military airports before they use roads as well. Using roads is last ditch effort shit.
There is basically nothing that will survive a direct hit, even NORAD can be taken out
Luke Martinez
>There is basically nothing that will survive a direct hit, even NORAD can be taken out You will not get a direct hit on a blast door that is 500m inside a blast tunnel, below 800m of solid rock, hell you would probably not even get a direct hit on the entrances to the blast tunnel that is at the bottom of a valley with several hundred meters of peaks around it. Unless you have a 10 megaton warhead somehow laydown delivered right outside the entrance it's not gonna do much other then blow out the blast doors for the blast tunnel and the blast over pressure vents.
Juan Smith
No shit
Like I said, even subterranean structures will be damaged or destroyed with a direct hit by a large enough nuclear weapon
Christopher Brooks
And i keep telling you you won't make that hit.
Dominic King
The A-10 also has rough field capability meaning it can take off from grass or dirt if it needs to.
Kevin Turner
Maybe in the 50s when you actually had to drop a bomb out of a plane or the 60s and 70s when guidance tech wasn't nearly as good as it is today
NORAD and other vital underground locations will certainly take hits from multiple weapons as well
Luke Adams
There would be a few failures but a place like NORAD would have a dozen + large (10-20 MT) warheads heading it's way. C+C is an important target
Gabriel Thomas
We still got them and used them pretty much on a 1-2 year bases whenever there is a exercise.
However, as far as I recall only 1-2 out of the original 5 "War spare runway" were used during these exercise. As since one of them are decommissioned while the other two hasn't been used for a while. But they still get the proper maintenance.
Attracted quite a crowds whenever they do decide to use these spare runway, and a massive traffic jam...
pretty sure that highway was only built because they could make it under national security, or else the feds had no rights to build it. There is a reason many off ramps are so tall user.
Nolan Ross
Were the germans the first ones to come up with this idea during WW2?
Luis Gutierrez
secret and emergency airways aren't new, but before 1944 people mostly used fields and other naturally flat surfaces prepared for the occasion.
May be because jets take off and land at higher speeds, so long, reinforced and really flat runways were needed? I dunno.
Chase Garcia
Someone was missing a pack of cocoa in their Swiss Miss box today
Colton Phillips
yeah, ive had people in my extended family in the military that talked about certain highways being usable to land transports or fighters. As other people poster, here in australia along the nullarbor plain in australia along the south coast multiple large sections are extra wide and hardened specifically so aircraft can land on htem for medevac purposes for people that are in the desert/outback.
As a funny side story -In my highschool flight program one of my instructors told a story how in i think singapore the international airport runway is built on the same exact heading/direction as the highway that approaches to the airport, and it was a VERY frequent thing for the south east asian airline pilots to mistake the highway for the runway late at night and almost land there. Funny shit.
After a quick look, it seems that all runways were bombed to shit so the germans simply removed the middle part on some autobahn sections to make more airfields as quickly as possible. Seven improvised runways were made this way, starting summer 44.
