Originally posted by Shkval1
[dreary mod on]
Kasatka is “Hirundo rustled”, not “Hirundo daurlca”, not “Delichon urbica”, not “Riparia riparia”, not “Progne subis”, not other 120 species of swallows.
Does it migrate to Africa, and if it does… does it bring coconuts?
(couldn’t help).
They were first to the crash sites – so what? There was media coverage of both wrecks, the remains of them were published almost everywhere even vaguely related to military aviation.
Yes, imglinked from Venik 😀
Steve,
ever wondered why those dumb and inexperienced spotters at the other side of the airbase always have a totally different log than you on the very same day? Yes, it’s those lazy Dutch crewchiefs, every time yet another F-16 is shot down over Tajikistan or Serbia, they paint the serial of the crashed one on one side of the tail of another one. That way, both remain seen as operational aircraft…
It’s actually a shame that Yugoslavia’s largest underground airbase is no longer in use, and is absolutely rotting away. Bihac-Zeljava was definately the largest one in Europe. Five runways (each 2,9 kilometres), four underground hangar complexes for a total of 80 MiG-21s…
One of the normal entrances, not just suitable for the MiGs.
Below the state of the taxiways in the fall of 2003. It doesn’t seem likely the base is about to re-enter service (in whatever role), there seem to be some border disputes in the area between Croatia and BiH, conveniently running across the base. Definately an interesting base.
Edit: consider this an answer to Billy. The base cost appearantly ‘only’ six billion dollars to build. However, the experience gained from building Zeljava did get the Yugoslavs some profitable base-building contracts in Iraq.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the US has built an amount of underground command and control bunkers in Afghanistan, but i seriously doubt anything directly related with aircraft is dug in. First of all, such underground facilities are of course hugely expensive to build. The dateline of the article being July2002 doesn’t make me believe there was enough time to build anything substantial underground.
Also, an underground airbase is only really convenient (and IMHO worthwile) if you want to protect your assets deployed at that base from a large enemy attack. Neither seem likely for Herat: i don’t think the US will deploy a fighter wing so close to Iran, and most definately not without proper protection. Defensive, underground hangars are just not the US’ thing to do.
That Chinese National Air Museum is the Datang Shan place, they have put something smaller in place of that Bull.
And, to make this post a total hodgepodge, here’s an overview of Slatina airbase, showing the location of the underground hangar in relation to the rest of the base.
Good article Icarus.
The picture i posted of Hualien is terribly old, i found. There indeed is a whole new runway built to the west of the ‘old’ Hualien, which is Jiashan (i’ve also seen ChaShan for it, could be a transcription thing though).
You can see on the ONC chart where Jiashan was under construction to give an approximate location of it versus Hualien.
Below are two maps of the airbases, the left one Jiashan and the other one Hualien. They are in the same scale, you can see the connecting taxiway going SE from Jiashan’s SE corner, and going NW from Hualien’s SW corner. They should be some five or six kilometres apart, the taxiway itself is built on a dyke and crosses a few water bits as you can see on the ONC map.
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