Why Indian Air Force landing jets on Agra-Lucknow Expressway is significant
The Indian Air Force (IAF) has successfully demonstrated its capabilities to land both transport and fighter aircraft on an expressway on October 24.
It was for the first time ever that the IAF had landed C-130J Super Hercules on an expressway. This aircraft can carry around 200 troops. During the exercise, the purpose behind landing this aircraft ahead of fighter aircraft was to ensure that IAF’s Special Forces, Garud commandos, first takeover on this “makeshift runway” (and ensure that further landings of the fighter aircraft) take place in a “securer” atmosphere.
The entire drill constituted a touchdown and takeoff of fighter aircraft like Jaguar, Mirage 2000 and Sukhoi-30 on Lucknow-Agra Expressway in Unnao. Two years back somewhat similar exercises (without transport aircraft landing) were conducted earlier on the Yamuna Expressway and Lucknow-Agra Expressway.
#WATCH Indian Air Force aircraft on Lucknow-Agra expressway during IAF landing exercise pic.twitter.com/5hF9liTBcH
— ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) October 24, 2017
For IAF, these highways could emerge as a force multiplayer because they could be put in use effectively during wartime when a runway is not available. Such possibility could arise when the main runway gets attacked by the enemy and rendered unserviceable for landing. Under such circumstances, aircraft which are already flying in air need to land safely and highways could be quickly converted into a landing strip for that purpose. Such exercises are required to ensure that pilots are sufficiently trained and ground infrastructure gets adequately developed.
The idea of using a highway as an alternative landing strip is World War II concept. Nazi Germany is known to have used highway strips as alternative runways. The idea got suitably established during the Cold War period when highway strips were systematically built in both part of the Germany.
Slowly, this idea has gained traction with China, Taiwan, Japan, North Korea, and Pakistan in Asia and in Poland, Australia, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland in other parts of the world. Even a non-state actor like the LTTE is known to have used highways as landing strips in northern parts of Sri Lanka.
Using highways as an alternative landing strip has relevance not only during war, but also during natural calamities. States could speed up their disaster relief operations if highways are close to the disaster locations.
In such cases, highways could act as an "advance landing ground". One of the documented cases of highways being used as an alternative landing strip is from the Word War II. During 1940s, the Finnish Air Force is known to have re-deployed its aircraft to such temporary airfields to save itself from air raids by the erstwhile USSR. This idea did prove beneficial when the Soviets attacked its airfields but could not inflict major damage since the airfields were sans aircraft. Since then Finland has made significant investments in this idea of secondary airfields.
Today, the Finnish Air Force is fully capable of operating from road bases and some of their aircraft are known to be specifically modified for such operations.
In Asian theatre, China has conducted exercise on highways during 1989. Some of their highways situated in Henan province have this dual use facility of makeshift airstrip and an exercise to that effect was carried out during 2014.
The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) demonstrated such capabilities during 2000 and 2010. During 2010, the PAF had conducted a major exercise called "Exercise High Mark 2010". During this exercise activation of road runways by utilising portions of the motorway was practiced with few landings and takeoffs conducted.
The government of India is known to have identified 12 highways, which could also work as runways, if the need arises. It is important to note that special efforts are required to build a highway which also could be capable of operating as a runway strip. Such a strip should be a strait and sufficiently wide covering a minimum distant of 2,700 metres without any obstacles like road dividers etc.
Pavement strength is of utmost importance. Pavement thickness and radius of relative stiffness are required to be decided based on the nature of possible air operations particularly giving importance to the likely aircraft weight. The Indian administration is thinking to use some of the highways in remote areas as an alternative to airfields for operating civilian aircraft.
It could be incorrect to judge the capabilities of the nation state based of the nature of network for such facilities. From military perspective, highways are alternative to the primary airfields.
Investments in highway strips would also depend on the nature of secondary airfields available for the usage. In case of the United States, no major investments are known to have been made towards developing highway strips. This is probably because the US has very many small private and public airfields. Also, majority of their air effort takes place from the fleet of aircraft carriers.
India has more than 120 airports operated by the Airports Authority of India (AAI). Also, in total, approximately 450 airports (including airstrips) are located throughout India. Some of these airstrips are known to be totally abandoned.
Today, along with the development of 12 highways as alternative airstrips to cater to crisis, there is also a need to develop some strategically useful alternative airfields.