Originally Posted by
bonajet
Hello S89. It was a landing. Funnily enough I don't remember too many ploughing incidents but we were careful to use grass strips that were firm enough. I do recall a couple of slipping off the tin strips in the field in Germany on the GR3/T4s but this was usually when taxiing to the hides from the main metal strip. My guess is that the Marine Corp would have been a bit more aggressive than us in the use of the aircraft on damp ground.
Minimum hardness for a grass strip was CBR (Californian Bearing Ratio) of 2.5 at 6” increasing with depth. For smoothness, it was Landrover at 30kts without knocking yourself out or losing your dentures! Minimum speed for landing on grass was 50 kts, which did little damage to the turf and all the crud went behind the intakes. Having said that, we had a US exchange pilot who did a VL completely off the pad during initial night flying and it didn’t damage the aircraft at all.
The funniest thing I saw during grass ops was the first take-off from a strip in Senelager, when on nozzle rotation, every vole within a 50yard radius exited their burrows vertically at warp 6.
Amazing what niff-naff the brain retains!
Mog