are still being underwritten in part by government coffers - our taxpayers money
As the airfield has to be there regardless of whether it has 1, 10 or 1000 military and/or civil movements per day, then perhaps we should be thankful that the irreducible spare contributes to the coffers of the MOD and offsets some of the taxpayers bill!!
but not when artificially pretending you have a longer useable runwaythan you really have
And here in lies the stupidity of the recent "RESA" changes. Of course the full length of the runway is useable, it is just that some fool has decided to change "safety" regulations. As an example the changes meant that Gibraltar was no longer capable of accepting the Nimrod (before it went out of service) because they had artificially shortened their runway length to comply with the new regulations. An aircraft that operated from an RAF runway perfectly safely for 30+ years could no longer operate from that self same piece of concrete because the threshold markings had been moved further down the runway. It does beg the question: are civil pilots now so bad that they cannot land safely on a designated strip of concrete unless it is 4 miles long and with another 2 miles of run-off area at either end?
