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Old 31st Mar 2020, 16:56
  #28 (permalink)  
Jetset 88
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Nth Staffs, UK
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Hello jackoniko,
I've been looking through all the posts re your query about a VC10 landing on 6594 runway.
The answer is most definitely yes as my chum Jheiminga has stated. (He runs the magnificent vc10.net website which is the definitive answer to everything VC10).

I was the one who flew the Sultan of Oman's Royal Flight VC10 A4O-AB into the Brooklands Museum in July 1987. The runway gets shorter every time I'm asked to tell the tale about how long the Brooklands runway actually was!
Give or take a bit for my memory lapse after some 33 years, it was betwen 3,300 ft and 3,500 ft.
As a minor digression I would add that prior to VC10s in the RAF I was a QFI flying Bulldogs. One annual task that came my way three years running was the training of a student to represent our squadron in the annual Spot Landing competition. We won it each year. At Brooklands we were ultra light with minimal fuel, having only flown from Heathrow via Lasham and Farnborough that day and had just a couple of pax on board, so we were virtually empty.
We had the lines painted the week before and the aim was to Spot-Land our touch down between the two. In the event the rear bogies straddled the first line and, using full reverse thrust with relatively light braking, we actually had to put power on again reach the turn off taxiway in a dignified way at the far end of the runway.
The Byfleet Council had kindly cut down a few trees immediately at the threshold of the runway for our landing from south to north over the M25, the horribly brown-painted electricity pylons which were very difficult to see which we passed at about 600ft just to the south of the airfield. Contrary to some texts about my exploits which I have seen, we did NOT land over the railway line from north to south nor was the M25 closed either. It was all very dignified and totally non-hairy.
The runway length required for landing any aircraft depends on many factors such as airfield elevation (this affects the ground speed over the threshold when flying at the normal approach indicated airspeed since at higher airfield elevations amsl, the G/S is higher than at sea level.). Other factors such as weight and temperature, runway slope and wind velocity all come into the equation. Peformance A landing requirements for planning a landing assume that only idle reverse thrust is used but full braking is applied. It also assumes that all the flaps speedbrakes and are working normally. However we did actually use full reverse thrust and relatively light footbraking to avoid the brakes getting hot and the tyres then going bang half an hour after shutting down which would have been embarrassing on a day when we were in the 'limelight'.
Don't ask me more tech stuff because now 15 years into retirement, my brain has now stopped. Now, how long did I say the runway was?
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