Pierced Steel Plank (Marston Mat)

[Chippik]

Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone has had any experience of landing/operating on this stuff before? just curious really and are there any airfields that still use it?

If it was good enough in WW2 as a temp/semi permanent airstrip surely it would be good enough for a private strip here?

PSP Landing Mat | Calumet Industries (http://www.calumetindustries.com/?cat=36)

[Fitter2]

If you use it (and it is good for the purpose, although I don't know current cost and therefore economics) be careful that the odd one of the link 'hooks' doesn't get bent up and fails to link. With flexing they gradually bend up and make an excellent tyre destroyer. Once the whole mat is assembled, you can't do anything useful without complete disassembly, and it all distorts slightly making reassembly a right bugger.

Also, heavier aircraft using differential wheelbraking to turn can easily ruin tyres. We used the stuff for a while as a readiness pan in the far east until they laid a concrete one. and aircraft had to stop on the runway and be backed straight into position to taxi straight out, or else it was a double tyre change every sortie.

[gasax]

I leased an airfield with a variation of this system. You have to say that it lasted pretty well for 50 years but....

Great for puncturing tyres and it needed some careful inspection and selective pruning to keep that potential down to a sensible level. Generally it was the vehicles - mowers, tractors etc that suffered more than the aircraft.

But you could not pull sections of it up without causing major disruption to the ground surface so lots of little holes and carefull cutting and bending were necessary.

But it did allow pretty heavy aircraft to operate from grass strips so is was pretty effective in its day. Given the choice for light aircraft - give it a miss - it is much more effort than the loads from light aircraft justify.

[SNS3Guppy]

I've used a lot of PSP over the years. It's designed to rapidly turn an unprepared surface into an operating surface for aircraft, and to enable rapid repairs of an airfield. It's useful for putting over soft or unstable surfaces when walking, too.

If you have other choices, use them. PSP was never designed to be the ideal surface. It's an only choice in areas where rapid construction has required it's employment, and landing on it is no option. In other words, it's great when you've got nothing else. It's not so great if you have any other choice.

[rotorfossil]

The choice these days is PERFO interlocking squares of hard wearing material with holes that the grass grows through. Seems to work but definitely not cheap.
PSP was only meant for very short term use in wartime and even then caused many problems.