Guy Alcala wrote:

Evan Brennan wrote:

"Ian" wrote in message ...
"Evan Brennan" wrote in message
m...
Guy Alcala wrote in message
...
snip
British and Argentine writers said the same thing about Mirage
fighters, so your accusations are as poorly aimed as the British bombs
falling on Stanley airfield. : )


May have missed it somewhere else in the thread, (and I know it's got a
smiley after it) but wasn't the error on the Vulcan raid due to the
cartographer putting the wrong co-ordinates on the map?

The wisecracks from the Argentine pilots came because the British
mounted such a massive effort to cause such minor damage. The Vulcans
and Harriers attacked the runway with 1,000-pounders, but only one
bomb hit.

One bomb from the Vulcan. According to "F:TAW", two 1,000 lbers from a stick of three
dropped by Bertie Penfold in a lay-down delivery on 1 May also hit, but given the shallow
angle and lack of height and speed (they were para-retarded), they just scabbed the runway
and were a relatively minor problem. They would have needed to use something like Durandal
or BAT to have a chance of cratering the runway seriously form that profile. IIRR, the
Brits did have to repair the scabs after the war, though. IIRR the details of the damage
found on the runway and the repairs required are in "The Falklands aftermath: Picking up
the Pieces" by Lt. Gen (ret.) Edward Fursdon.

I've now retrieved Fursdon (btw, it's Maj. Gen. (ret.) not Lt. Gen. as I wrote) from a distant
library. He arrived via C-130 from Ascension in Stanley on 27 July 1982 -- here's the damage
the Royal Engineers told him they had to repair:

"The airfield at Stanley had been built by British contractors in the late Seventies to cater
for the short-haul Fokker a/c operated by Argentina, in fact by the [AAF], flying between the
Falklands and Argentina. Its runway was 4,100 feet long and 150 feet wide and designed to
Load Classification Number (LCN) 16 but was subsequently estimated, with an increased pavement
thickness, to be of LCN 30 standard.

"During the campaign the runway had been cratered by the Vulcan bomber and Harrier raids, and
had suffered over 1,000 'scabs' or shalow scuffs in its surface. The Argentinians had
temporarily back-filled the five large craters [Guy: 1 deep one by Vulcan, the other four
shallower, by retard bombs dropped by SHAR/GR.3], enabling them to continue to fly in C-130
Hercules transports right up to the end. They had also arranged rings of earth on the runway
to show up as craters on British air reconnaissance photos.

"By properly repairing three craters and dealing with about 500 'scabs', No. 1 Troop of 59
Commando Squadron Royal Engineers had the northern half of the runway ready to accept the
first British Hercules on 24 June [Guy: Obviously, risks worth taking in landing on a rough
runway during the war wouldn't be taken afterwards. One of the Argentine C-130s almost
crashed on takeoff during the war when a main gear wheel hit the corner of the
roughly-repaired Vulcan crater]. The craters had compacted 'fill' and were topped by sheets
of AM2 matting, secured by four-feet long steel pins, taken from a conveniently placed
abandoned stockpile brought to the Island in the early Seventies by Argentinians in connection
with a runway which was never completed*. The 'scabs' were effectively repaired with Bostik
276, which is a magnesium phosphate cement/fine aggregate mixture.

"The focus now turned on the southern part of the runway which included one huge crater made
by the RAF Vulcan's 1,000 lb. bomb. This alone took more than 1,000 square meters of the old
Argentine AM2 matting to repair. 'We were in fact really very relieved that only one Vulcan
bomb had actually hit the runway', said a weary Sapper.

"By 1 July No. 3 Troop of 11 Field Squadron had completed the repairs and the whole runway was
again usuable, but both the crater and the 'scab' repair areas called for constant monitoring
and maintenance. Nevertheless the reopened runway withstood a further 77 Hercules and several
hundred Harrier landings, operationally vital to the Garrison, before it was closed for
extension and complete re-surfacing on the evening of 15 August."

The upgrade was so that F-4s could operate from it, and involved using AM2 to cover the entire
runway and extend it to 6,100 feet, boosting the LCN to 45, adding five arrester gears,
increasing apron area five times, adding three dispersals with hangars, lights, power, fuel
etc. It was realised early in the war that this would need to be done, so materiel orders and
design had continued while it was still being fought. The runway itself was completed and
reopened for traffic on 27 August.

*Fursdon may be in error here. Argentina had built a short AM-2 matting runway at Hooker's
Point, to use while the hard surface runway was being debated and then built. However, during
1978 or 1979, high winds lifted the matting and essentially destroyed the runway. Ewen
Southby-Tailyour was in command of NP 8901 at the time the runway was destroyed, and describes
it in his book "Reasons in Writing." The 'stockpile' may have been matting etc. that was
salvaged, or it may have been left over from the original construction as Fursdon says.
Things tended to move slowly in the Falklands pre-war, so it's easy to believe that this stuff
could be sitting around for several years. Southby-Tailyour mentions that the Royal Marine
barracks at Moody Brook had been condemned as unfit for human occupancy, first in 1918 and
again in 1945, but was still in use with only minor repairs in 1982! The war finally
destroyed it.

Guy