Message posted by Richard C on November 03, 2003 at 9:13:00 PST:

For military standards in the UK, many runways were built at around 9,000ft....long enough to take any aircraft NATO has in its 'known' inventory.
RAF Mildenhall (USAFE) has a 9,220ft runway and was the European deployed base (permanant detachment) for SR-71s.

Machrihanish is as stated under 'enhanced care and maintenance' but since it closed officially to military traffic it has seen quite a few exercises. The USAFE use the airfield for Special Forces exercises out of Mildenhall (MC130s/MH53M's) and for the past few weeks, RAF special forces hercules have been operating in the area with Chinooks and paradropping in the vicinity.

RAF Boscombe Down's 10,538ft long runway is longer than Machrihanish.
Also, RAF Brize Norton has a runway at 10,007ft, which makes it slightly longer than Machrihanish also.

As for Fairford, its 10,000ft runway was re-surfaced, as was the taxi-ways and pretty much re-designed. It looked like one big construction site back then.
RAF Mildenhall is soon to get its runway resurfaced and all 'heavy' aircraft such as KC135s will be re-deploying to RAF Fairford for 3-4 months.
Fairford is still a European abort site for the Space Shuttle also.

Rich

In Reply to: Longest runway posted by FreebirdUK on October 26, 2003 at 5:36:40 PST:

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