Courtney I'm pretty sure the runway was completely matted by the time I was detached there in Dec 82. Near the end of our 6month detachment it was decided to remove and re-lay the first third of the runway, as the tiles had "slid " forward with all the constant use. The Royal Engineers were in charge of the job, but there was a fair sized RAF presence on the task. Myself and a few other guys from GSE were tasked with putting in the wiring for the lights. As the tiles were laid from one side to the other, at a certain point it all ground to a halt as we needed to run cable in from the edge to the centre. This gave the guys laying it a wee break, as they weren't hanging about doing it. During this the runway was unusable for the Phantoms, so the Harriers were doing the "Q" thing. A couple of times a Herc did get airborne, while the work was in progress. The tiles were all stacked up on the runway near where the work started. The first time a Herc took of, it blew these tiles off the stacks. After that the forklifts were placed in front of them with the forks down on the stacks. I can't actually remember seeing a Herc landing back at Stanley while the work was on-going, but it must have been an interesting experience for the crews.
There was a story going round that landings were to be balanced out, so that both ends were used, to prevent this slippage from happening, but in the 6 months I was there, I can recall only a few occasions when aircraft landed from the Stanley end.