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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

One of the coolest emergency airfields I can think of is, literally, Uruguay Route 9, along the coast of the country, where a 2-lane highway becomes an enormous runway that you continue driving along. I don't know if there were any famous landings there; I heard it's only used rarely by the Presidential jet.

Here's where it is: https://goo.gl/maps/fpwxuPzGVDtDEKmB8

and what it looks like when you drive on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C5LSrRkFyU

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Not that uncommon. The Czech motorway D1 can be converted to a military airstrip here: https://www.google.com/maps/@49.3870307,15.9211894,289m/data...

See where the grass divider ends, and gets replaced by a jersey barrier for 2 km? That part is the runway - it would require some hours of preparation before it would be usable, it's not quite "declare mayday and dump the plane there."

ah, that's very cool. Makes me think of all kinds of NATO-level shit that's strewn around the world waiting to be uncovered ;)

The thing with the road in Uruguay is that as you're driving, there's basically a yellow sign with a picture of an airplane and an arrow pointing up, and you're like "what the fuck did that mean?" And then suddenly you understand exactly what it meant because you're driving on a fucking runway...

As in, "give way to aircraft from above" :D

Sweden had/has roads onthe middle of nowhere/forest that has more free space on the sides and at each end of particularly strate and flat stretches, there are oversized parking spots. Supposedly so fighter planes could refuse and rearm from mobile crews

Finland has plenty of those too. Here's a video of an F-18 doing a landing and takeoff from such a stretch of road during some exercise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj_eJxy8ojk

The ones I've been on weren't signposted at all. You're just on a road, and suddenly the road is completely straight and very wide, and 3km later it's back to normal, and there's nothing visible nearby.

I googled and found a list on https://www.mil-airfields.de/se/list.htm but IIRC there must be something further northwest, not on the list.

The Czech one is more of a Warsaw-Pact-level shit. :-) Here is a (originally secret) documentary video about MiG-21 exercise on the highway (in Czech, obviously): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoZGoaG9_w

Wrong spot, I'm pretty sure youre thinking of Vyškov https://www.google.com/maps/@49.2936699,17.0223332,1311m/dat...

And I'm absolutely sure I wasn't: two different spots, both near military airbases, this one is somewhat longer than the Vyškov one. Personally drove on both of them, many times. Can't find an English source though: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leti%C5%A1t%C4%9B_M%C4%9B%C5%9...

Hmmm is that the one with the windmill rest stop thingy nearby?

Not aware of a windmill. The one I originally referenced has a McDonalds these days :D

Hah! I was driving down this route a few years back when I suddenly found myself on an airstrip along with all the other traffic. It was particularly bizarre given that I’d just driven down from tacuarembo to punta del Diablo on largely unpaved roads.

That said, it’s not the first road doubling up as a landing strip I’ve found myself on - there’s a stretch of the main road between Donetsk and Mariupol that was, in soviet times, used as an emergency field for strategic bombers. It’s this relatively quiet provincial highway that suddenly turns ridiculously wide, and goes dead straight and level for what feels like an eternity - 11km looking at google.

Oh, and RAF manston used to have a level crossing across a taxiway.

That’s quite a variety of locales to find yourself driving in. What took you to all those places?

Wanderlust.

This it? Looks like traffic stopped for a presidential landing. https://youtube.com/shorts/GQWtCBUlXq0

The Panamerican Road in El Salvador has an airfield like this too. It's next to a military base. I've never heard of it being used, maybe it was during the civil 80s civil war.

https://www.google.com/maps/@13.7720949,-89.3716038,3a,40y,1...

Interesting! Here is a closer view of the Runway 03 threshold:

https://goo.gl/maps/5JE2YpEh75V52coR6

And Runway 21 (the same runway in the opposite direction):

https://goo.gl/maps/2TDPFFNqbW1CSCGA8

There's a YouTube video[1] of the German Armed Forces showing an emergency airfield on a German Autobahn from 1988. It's subtitled, but only in German. Autotranslation is available though.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_cxkF6qSY8

A lot of roads are runways for JAS Gripen in Sweden/EU :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-2Xde54xz4

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