Posted on 04/19/2008 12:41:55 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
North building underground runway, report says
April 19, 2008
A U.S. commercial satellite has found a huge underground runway being built in eastern North Korea, a news report said yesterday.
A photograph provided by “Google Earth,” a U.S. provider of satellite photos, showed that North Korea is building a 30-meter (98-foot) wide and 1,800-meter-long military runway at a site southwest of Wonsan, the U.S. government-funded radio station Voice of America said.
“The cement-coated airstrip stretches southwestward from the northeast and is connected to a mountain tunnel,” the report said. “Around the runaway are stacks of soil and rocks dug out from the tunnel, which tells the construction work is now underway.”
The report quoted Park Myong-ho, a former North Korean air force captain who defected to South Korea in May 2006, as saying the facility is highly likely to be an underground military airstrip being constructed by North Korea’s military.
Park said the North’s fighter jets are supposed to strike targets in South Korea if a war breaks out and return to reserve air bases after finishing the strikes. “This underground facility is such a place,” he said.
North Korea has two to three similar underground runways, but all of them are obsolete, he said.
Yonhap
I suspect this is not a news. Somebody in FR provided Google photo a few years ago which looked like this. Also there was a report in RFA which said that this place has been known to specialists for 6 years.
Anyhow, it is true that N. Korea has multiple underground runways.
Ping!
Folks, please don’t tell Jimmy. He’ll go over there to fix things and they’ll have 20 of these runways in five years.
This is pretty much a waste of time and bandwidth to discuss the matter. It takes three seconds to drop precision-guided weapons at the entrances and then the whole thing is shut down for days while they “attempt” to clear it. This is the most hopeless military on the face of the earth...with tactics going back to 1952...and never improving a single method. I’m even betting the text books for the military academy there have never been rewritten since the late 1950s.
How can a plane take-off or land on an “underground runway”?
LOL! If NK needs money they could make the landing a "pay-per-view" event here in the USA...
Oh, I see. They actually built it so it comes out above ground at some point.
I should have given them more credit than I did from just reading the headline!
I understand that the Swiss can launch aircraft from facilities buried in the sides of mountains. Recovery is more problematic.
So all you have to do to disable this base is cause a land slide at both ends of the tunnel? Or chuck a couple of canisters of laser guided napalm in first?
BTW, I’d be amazed if the U.S. and South Korean military haven’t alright pinpointed all the ventilation inlets. Just have Special Forces teams pour gasoline down the ventilation inlets.
And get an ex-football star to run the line, chucking in grenades?
Perhaps they have "underground aircraft" similar to "underwater ships" in the navy known as submarines ;-)
Then there is another plan, unconventional terrorist warfare, using their special forces. Taking large city(Seoul) as a hostage with WMD.
Would be that funny if runaway collapse while pilot taking off with the planes
I know it sick joke I think that be funny
Beside it wouldn’t be first time people get kill by faulty Communist building engineers it wouldn’t be last time
I would imagine landing at one of these would have a HIGH pucker factor!!!
bttt
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