Parking lots would make more sense than highways.
Extremely big parking is an US thing!
British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
101–110 of 332 posts
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#102Highway landing and take-off on its own is useless. F35 requires extensive machinery to maintain, in needs proper airport and hangars. It is not possible to operate it somewhere from forest! And vertical landing/takeoff can not support any load, it can not even be fully fuelled! In Czechia we are replacing Gripens that can operate from almost anywhere. It only needs a few hundred meters of road, and single truck to r…
It still saves you on cost and space to host backup airstrips in case your country enter at war if you can share part of it with civil use.
Those motorway strips were all over the place in Geany during the Cold War. Most, if not all, got built back since. The idea of operating modern milizary aircraft from ad-hoc and improbvised airfields is nothing new. Easier to do with s/vtols so, added bonus for aircraft being carrier rated.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#103Highways will be able to land vertically with this technology?
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#104As long as our global society puts this much carbon in the atmosphere for "defence" purposes, we have no chance of maintaining a human-friendly climate on Earth in 20-30 years.
Defence is c. 2% of the world economy and probably something similar for carbon emissions.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#105Cold-War West Germany had about 30 "Emergency Airstrips", about 3km long Autobahn sections that could be converted to airports for military use. Complete with parking lots designed for aircraft parking, mobile air control towers, etc. Large enough that we landed C-130 Hercules on them.
Similar strips exist in Finland, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. Though most of the German locations are now retired and removed.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
the pilot isn't the expensive kit, although the flight-hours to train them may be. Even an unmanned NGAD will probably cost ~500MM.
The flight hours + HR costs. The key financial advantage of drones is that they don't need money to live after work, health insurance, or a pension plan. It's expensive to ask people to risk their lives for work. And specifically for forward deployment scenarios: they don't require human support infrastructure pushed forward, at great cost. Even in austere military terms, it's logistically expensive to keep a human a…
Also you can build a drone AI and cheaply deploy it to 1000 drones. Whereas each human pilot must be expensively trained.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you are part of a NATO operation against Serbia. Mentioning it, because the conflict in Kosovo is not resolved yet.
Last time Serbia attempted to commit literal genocide, for the second time in less than a decade, for NATO to get involved. Do you think they'll start mass murders again?
What I know is that serbians who were assigned to northern Kosovo do not recognize the authority of Prishtina. This is still a major issue between Serbia and Kosovo and it is a regular reason for increased tension between the two. More than anything else, the perspective for EU membership keeps the tensions down, but do not expect that Serbia will disregard the problem just because.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#108Has the RAF actually surveyed some of the motorways in the north of England recently? I nearly broke a spring from a dipped pothole on the M6 south. Not to forget all the smart motorway signs every 100 meters and signboards overhead, will make a landing "interesting".
Vertical landing drops staight in from the sky, and comes to an immediate halt. These planes just need a strip of concrete wider & longer than the plane itself. Realistically you could comfortably put one down on a motorway service station carpark, and then lay a short portable runway along its off-ramp for takeoff.
> Realistically you could comfortably put one down on a motorway service station carpark
I'm sure the exceptionally canny operators of motorway service stations would find a way to make some extra money off them then. Come for a coffee, stay for a jet launch.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
People can withstand only certain G-s of acceleration. Remove them, and you have a much more manueverable craft.
Manoeuvrability probably isn’t as useful as it used to be. Fighter jets used to need to keep their radar, in the nose of the aircraft, pointed at their target to keep the target lit up for the missile to find. At close enough range if you can out turn your opponent and get out of its radar, you can “break radar lock-on”. Today though, missiles have their own radar that works at close ranges but, if I’m right, still n…
If the ai plane can fly higher and faster than the rocket or at least a human plane because it does not have to care about a human body, then you have scenarios where the rocket must be shot significantly closer to catch the plane. Not much into military stuff, but seems logical that more options create more margins for success. Savings on inner space, human training, and equipment are only a bonus.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t help but think it must be about protecting the aircraft rather than protecting the surface, as in ukraine roads are commonly built out of reinforced concrete slabs, and somewhat less commonly, but still frequently, they are built to take the weight of tanks, and are wide and straight enough to accommodate even large aircraft - there’s a strip of highway north of Mariupol that was originally built to accommoda…
Is concrete used much in Europe? I’d think asphalt is a much more common highway surface material.
In the UK concrete has mainly been superseded by asphalt but there are one or two hold-outs. The M3 motorway (which heads from London down to Winchester / Southampton) has a long (ten miles?) concrete stretch which I drove along every day for years, although this is the exception that proves the rule. The road was noticeably more noisy / rumbly than others.