Article about the airport that I learned to flt at 45+ yrs ago. Good to see it is alive and well. Ohio GA Airport Beats with a Heart of Steel - FLYING Magazine This statement by owner caught my attention There was a lot of flight training back in the day. Many students learned to fly on that "dangerous" 40ft wide runway. LOL. Not sure why you need anything wider than the wingspan.[/quote]
40 feet? That is practically an interstate! There is a little airport I like to go to around here that has a 25 foot wide runway.
I think 40ft was actually wider than when I took lessons. Winter time a C-150 wings would extend over the plowed snow on the runway edges. I've always thought that basic flying skills are best learned at a small field, plus save a bunch of $ vs a controlled field.
Those really wide ones can foul up your perceptions on approaches when you are used to the typical fighter runway.
Austin Bergstrom then Bergstrom AFB was a B52 base for a period. It has 12000 +ft but is only 150 wide.
Yup, got that one wrong. Minot AFB 300', Edwards AFB 300', Barksdale AFB 299' All the current B-52H bases have ~300' wide runways, but not in the past. Even Castle AFB, where the B-52 RTU was located for decades, only has a 150' wide runway.
Do the 52's ever do staggered TO's, and if so would they need a wider (eg 300ft) runway? Or is that a big no-no with wake turbulence?
All the Elephant Walks I have seen were single ship at fairly close interval. Alternating sides of the runway could cut down on wake turbulence if the winds cooperated, but we would have to ask a BUFF crew for more details.
I witnessed a B-52 scramble at Larson AFB in the 60's and they didn't have a staggered setup. They took off at fairly close intervals blind and spread out after launch. One of the guttiest things I have ever seen. The smoke was impenetrable and the noise was almost as bad as the KC-135's that scrambled before them. The B-52 can not take off with the outboard wing tanks full. The max load has to be topped off in flight by the tankers. The B-52 is an amazing piece of engineering to this day. I'll be 98 in a few weeks and working on that airplane is beginning to feel like some kind of history book story.
I know a couple guys working on the B-52 re-engine. One of em was looking at the CAD model and came across some weird wiring brackets in the wing holding 4 wires that looked like it was meant for the wires to slide on. He asked me what I thought it was but I'd never seen anything like it. Finally we figured out that it was for the throttle cables. It never occurred to us that the B-52H has physical throttle cables going to each engine! The amount of fuel the B-52 holds is staggering. We've also got a big 25,000 gallon fuel tank outside our window. It's probably 20ft in diameter and 30 ft tall. I realized that it would take two of those just to fill up the tanks on one B-52.
Thank you, I enjoy everybody here very much. I'm very fortunate and appreciative to have seen and done so many things. One thing that I learned is that the rich and famous are still plain ol' people like everybody else, they just have a different skill and some of them a lot of luck. They have the same faults and foibles as the rest of us. As for the B-52 stuff, I'll never forget the first time I saw the fuselage tank fuel vent duct.Running aft of the center section through the waist section, it had a huge circular loop in it. The duct was about 1 foot in diameter. I asked the dumb question of why it had that loop and i was told that it would break from fuselage flexing without it. I saw a head-on photo of a B-52 in a hard banking turn and there was at least a 2 degree twist in the fuselage between the horizontal tail and wing .It's the Air Force's Big Rubber Duckie.
I forgot to mention that the tubing runs on the front spar of the B-52 and KC-135 have flex loops in them to work when the wing bends in flight. I have mentioned it before that the B-52 wing tip has a travel of 35 feet when flexed from full negative to full positive.
I learned on 27 x 1800(1500 with threshold) on a slope. Some of the other students soloed there. I had to solo had a bigger nearby airport until I got good enough to operate out of the small runway. Another local school I looked at didn't let any of their airplanes land on less than 50ft wide or 2000ft long. If you learn on 50ft wide, you probably will use that as your minimum. Airplanes are expensive, so people get more and more conservative. Luckily insurance companies don't yet seem to count runway size against you in pricing. Also, the bigger schools and airports attract a lot of career path people. Their goal is to get through the general aviation part and onto some commercial job. They have no interest in narrow runways. A narrow runway will effectively cost them more. Going from 40ft to 75ft wide probably will bring in some puppy mill type school(s), which is good for the airport.
They have a flight school there now. Owners are also Cirrus dealer, which would definitely like the longer runway. But in late 70's when my Dad and I took lessons on that 'dangerous' runway there was a robust flight school. Of course that was when a C-150 was $13/hr wet and the instructor was $13/hr. Those are the types of airports I have always sought out. If a bigger airport then I would pick a spot to hit and a spot to stop. Then there is Amarillo, where the challenge is how many stop and go's you could do without going around.
