Comments on: Hercules’ Newest Labor

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 04:04:59 +0000

More’s the pity. I figure most of the Iraqi Airforce’s fields are designed for fighters, since I doubt they had many heavy bombers or strategic airlift. Thus the biggest runways are going to be Baghdad International.
You do know that C-130 and C-17 are supposedly rated for landing in austere conditions, and that the MC used the highway system to land a C-130 during OIF I?

By: David Axe

David Axe — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 07:35:08 +0000

Charles,
Sadly, there are only two small runways in Kurdistan — one in Erbil and another in Sulaymaniyah. All of the major runways in use in Iraq are ones inherited from the Iraqi Air Force, so any major change in the air lines of communication will require some serious investment.

By: Charles

Charles — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 03:27:47 +0000

Same deal with the C-5’s, where the tooling was destroyed so some other aircraft could win contract. Perhaps what we should do is land C-17s and C-5s into relatively safe Kurd territory (and/or Turkey) and ship things in through there instead of using Kuwait-Baghdad as our MSR. Might allow us to use the big aircraft closer to delivery point rather than landing them in Kuwait and sending material overland by truck through Indian Country.

By: Byron

Byron — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:02:41 +0000

Here we go again. We scrapped the C-123 tooling then desperately wanted more in Vietnam but couldn’t get them — All we could get was newer, more expensive, “better” aircraft that just didn’t work as well.
And then there are the 50+ year old front-line B-52s that several times were to be replaced by newer, more expensive, “better” aircraft.
Now we are desperately rebuilding A-10s and early model C-130s because the newer, more expensive, “better” aircraft just don’t work as well.
Oh well, nothing new here…