It has been claimed on a parallel thread that practice landings have been made with the aircraft stopping with some 300' to spare:
http://www.pprune.org/military-aircr...ml#post7964306
If this is so, my dismay at the seeming lack of proper forward planning for an arrival at Cosford deepens. When it was first envisaged that 808 should go there, the runway length (3890') was known, together with the possibility of obstacle clearance issues on approach. A bit of work with the ODM would, I'm sure, have revealed that the aircraft at a stripped-down weight could be stopped, as appears to have been proved, but that there would never have been much of an additional margin. That would have been sufficient for most folk and it sufficed for delivery of the ex-Sultan of Oman's aircraft onto a similarly limited runway at Brooklands in 1987, with the crew having to add power to taxi off. XR 808 and its sister aircraft lived their service lives by the ODM and if the ODM calculations were considered insufficient in this final case, then it would have been better for any plan to go to Cosford to have been abandoned at the outset. I cannot claim to know what all of the surrounding circumstances might have been but, if there were real misgivings at the operational level, these were never likely to have been resolved by pushing the matter upwards - 'No' was always the likely answer.
But I repeat, this should all have been sorted out ages ago - long before there was any question of CAS' manhood being called into question. It's a very sorry end to a most creditable era in RAF history.