Re: C-17 article could be a touch and drop and go runway


Message posted by Andre' M. Dall'au on December 18, 2003 at 4:51:05 PST:

Low Altitude Parachute Extraction or LAPES is still in use as a method to land everything up to fully loaded vehicles rapidly on a dirt strip. Fly real, real low, pop a parachute, and fly out from beneath a gargo pallet, and watch it skid to a stop. A similar method is used to deploy the BLU-82 out of the back of a SpecOps MC-130 from a much higher altitude. Big boom. Since we did it, the Russians use it too. Since that part of the country you mentioned looks a lot like parts of the mid east, the airfields could very easily be used for pre-deployment exercises (for NavSpecWar, SpecOps, Rangers, Airborne, Force Recon), certification exercises (same groups), or even as practice for an upcoming, specific Op. They probably use them at night, so you'd be lucky to catch the field(s) acually with troops in the area. Overall it probably is an intergal part of our ability to put our people where they need to be with the right preparation, with proven equipment and tactics. The USAF has their own exercises, where they wake the troops early, depoly to a semi-cleared area consisting of grassy, hilly and sandy terrain and proceed to test each other by sequentially trying to place small sphereical objects into eighteen hard to locate holes. I have heard the after action reports take hours or days to retell.


In Reply to: Re: C-17 article could be a touch and drop and go runway posted by aaron Johnson on December 17, 2003 at 19:25:58 PST:

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