ukraine?

i also dont think ukraine has any ASAT capability.If they had any they must have by now returned the components to Russia.

I think i have seen this picture before but i woulnt comment too much on it so i dont get yelled at 🙂 but it looks the closest to A-12 Saga. But it can also be photo-montage since i dont think this aircraft was ever made.

Samarah East AB

Samarah East AB is the first airfield we have seen built outright in the project “Super-Base”. The airfield is positioned at 34°09’56.27“/044°15’51.66“E, and has a single runway, constructed partially of concrete and partially of asphalt, with a lenght of 3000x45m/9843x148ft.

The Project “Super-Base” was launched by Iraq in 1975, in response to the experiences from Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973. Originally, 13 airfields were re-built by British contractors, and on all of them also a number of hardened aircraft shelters was built. Subsequently companies from Yugoslavia – previously engaged in building bridges in Iraq – became involved. Due to their specific construction of these airfields – which included taxi-ways leading right out of hardened aircraft-shelters and laid diagonally to the runways – they became known as “Trapezoids” or “Yugos”.

In addition to 13 re-built airfields during the mid-1980s the Yugoslavs have built also five entirely new facilities, code-named 202A (H-1 New AB), 202B, 202C, 202D, and 202E (Tallil AB). The code-names for Samarah East, Balad, and al-Bakr remain unclear, but known is that each of these “super bases” covered an area of 21.5 square miles (40 square kilometers), and had one or two concrete runways, usually at least 2.800m long and 45m wide.

The facilities on the super-bases were divided into two categories: “surface” and “underground”. The “surface” facilities were actually the “softest”, and included maintenance hangars of metal construction, and HAS of concrete construction. In total, the Yugoslavs have built no less but 200 HAS on different airfields in Iraq during the 1980s. The protection of each HAS consisted of one meter thick concrete shells, reinforced by 30cm thick steel plates. There was only one entrance and this was covered by sliding doors, made of 50cm thick steel armoured plate and concrete. The HAS’ were usually built in small groups – seldom more than five, with each group sharing the same water and power supply, besides having own backup gasoline-powered electrical generator, and each HAS being equipped with a semi-automatic aircraft-refuelling system.

In addition to “surface” HAS, the Yugoslavs have also built 24 “semi-surface” HAS at H-1 New, and 12 at H-3 South West, positioned near the end of the runways, with enterance and exit on each side.

The third kind of structures on “Super-Bases” were underground facilities that could shelter between four and ten aircraft on average. In order to build these the Yugoslavs used equipment and construction techniques identical to that use in underground oil-storage depots, additionally conealing the extension and the true purpose of the whole project. The underground facilities were all hardened to withstand a direct hit by a tactical nuclear bomb, burried up to 50 meters bellow the ground and consisted of the main aircraft “hangar” (consisting of two floors in several cases, connected by 40ts hydraulic lifts), connected with operations, maintenance, and logistical facilities via a net of underground corridors.

A former Soviet MiG-29 flight-instructor in Iraq, Lt.Col. Sergey Bezlyudny, later said in an interview about the Iraqi super bases:
I will admit that this air base literally overwhelmed me. I had never seen anything like it before, although while serving in the [Soviet] Uniton I had been in scores of garrisons. The equipment, shelters, and blast walls – everything was the last word in equipment and of outstanding quality. As far as I could see, it would have been virtually impossible to destroy this [hardened aircraft) shelter with tactical weapons, even very precise ones, and probably only by using nuclear weapons.

The total cost of building these five “Super-Bases” was $4.3 billion, and the project was completed in 1987.

I dont think he lied about how the facility looks,there is my picture of it on page 1.

Hey i found one picture of “private” underground hangar!Here is the explenation!:) hehe

The fascinating thing about Caswell Airpark is that it includes an underground hangar,

evidently constructed under the runway during the Cold War to house a private “escape plane”.

Les Parker visited the hangar in 2003.

His report: “The hangar is reinforced concrete & about 50′ wide by 30′ deep.

Just enough of the floor is concrete to accommodate a small tricycle landing gear. The rest is just clay.

The ramp up to the runway is paved about 2/3rds of the way up.

There is about 15′ of earth over the hangar up to the runway surface.

There is a tractor stored out of the weather in the now unused hangar.

It is open faced & I couldn’t find any door mounts, but it did have electric power at one time.

You can still see the conduit on the ceiling & walls.

I thought the lack of ‘blast doors’ was odd, considering the supposed reason for construction.

I believe a natural gully or depression was used & enlarged when the hangar was built.

Yancyville could have been ‘Mayberry’.

There are no first strike targets, that I am aware of, anywhere near by.

Danville VA is about 15 miles away, to the north. The doors do face south.

I was told by a ‘local’ who stopped by that the field was built by a wealthy doctor.

I might venture to guess that some military branch may run training operations there.

The runway looked pretty well mowed & has a tree-line at the west end.

There is what appears to be an old Civil Defense tower still there.”

Here is a nice text about Slatina airport:

Russians ‘raced to Pristina secrets’
FROM TOM WALKER AT SLATINA AIRFIELD, PRISTINA

RUSSIA’S initial dash to Kosovo may have had less to do with politics than with the protection of military secrets in underground hangars at Pristina’s Slatina airport, it was suggested yesterday.
The 270 soldiers who embarrassed NATO by beating alliance forces to the Kosovo capital returned to Bosnia yesterday as mysteriously as they had arrived. The airfield was one of the jewels in the crown of the late President Tito’s formidable defense network.
The two western taxiways of the north-south runway lead directly into a mountain, continuing for hundreds of yards inside.
In Tito’s day schoolchildren would be taken on trips to the facility. During the decade of President Milosevic’s repression, it has become one of the inner sanctums of his security machine, with civilian access barred.
Sources at Jane’s Defense Weekly speculated yesterday that the Russians may have had an interest in keeping NATO nations away from Slatina while the hangars and storage areas were cleared. The sources suggested that Slatina could have housed air defense and missile systems unfamiliar to the West that had been recently sold or hired to Belgrade in breach of sanctions.
Among the hardware the Yugoslav Army may have had inside the underground facility are SA10 surface-to-air missiles and a Czech-designed triangulation device, known as “Tamara”, capable of tracking Stealth aircraft.
An RAF officer in the British sector of Slatina said that during the first few days of Russian control, “the stuff was pouring out of here”. The officer, who was allowed into the Russian sector of the base only days ago, said Slatina was one of the most impressive military facilities he had seen.
Louis Garneau, NATO’s Kosovo spokesman, said the Canadian Army had been unsuccessful in monitoring what the Russians were up to. On Saturday night, for the first time in their month-long occupation of the airfield, the Russians allowed a few reporters on to the western taxiways.
Attempts to view the tunnels into the mountain were thwarted and officers insisted that the hangars inside the mountain were empty. There was evidence that NATO had attempted to bomb one of the massive steel doors protecting the tunnels but the Russians said it was still possible for aircraft to taxi in and out.
Local Albanians have always maintained that Slatina was used to house chemical weapons, and a source at Jane’s Defense Weekly said that similar facilities in Iraq had been used in this way. He pointed out, however, that accusations that the Serbs had used chemical weapons in the Bosnian conflict were largely unfounded, and there was little proof that they had been employed in Kosovo. Officially, the Yugoslav Army said Slatina was always used to house Mig21 and 29 aircraft.
Major Paul Young, a British Kfor spokesman, said Slatina’s tunnels may at last be opened to the press this week. The Russians, however, were less sure, and Lieutenant-Colonel Mikhail Koftunyenko said permission could only come from senior levels within the Russian Army.
As the initial and most controversial deployment of 270 Russians drove north to Podujevo yesterday, there was a sense at Kfor headquarters that the mystery of what was in Slatina will remain unsolved.

Now bit from Batajnica. As you can see here is a Mig-21 destroyed but note that it has old Yugoslav markings that went during whole lenght of the tail(new one is just short stripe) and this airplane was placed as a decoy. What is the point of this post is the tunnel behind it.It is a tunel trough which the blast from the explosion is supposed to be exit.