The road strips have been reinforced when they were built. Normal road understructure wouldn't take slamming down jets forever. Normal roads don't have 2 kilometer long straights either, so they are preselected locations. There are about two dozen such locations throughout Finland. Back in the day they were called "emergency landing strips", but it was obvious what the actual purpose was. Although technically a Russian invasion would be an emergency..
Plus normal roads would probably have lamp posts and/or power/telephone lines running alongside them which would have to be taken down for the duration of air operations. Between all the main military airbases, civilian airfields plus the road bases, there are more places to station the fighters than there are flights (parvi) of F-18s
And there are different rating of these strips. Like shown here it's just a 2 mile straight in a road. But those emergency landing spots are larger and basicly a Airport strip on a road those bigger strips can take down bigger airliners like passenger planes/servive planes, but since fighters do not have long wings they can come down on a normal roads. Some of those "emergency strips" even have hangars of sorts there in the forest nearby, some of them don't. Atleast Sweden has same kind of decentralized air force facilities. And at some time German Airforce also made some sort of study about possible road airbases. And of course there have been claims some secret strips to be available but never used in time of peace
We do the same in Sweden, its done while the road is being constructed. I've been a traveling salesman in Scandinavia for a couple of decades now and the most concentration of these I've seen have been central-east of Sweden, just north/south of Stockholm.
@@Hairysteed Some road bases don't have lamp posts. Some of the road bases have regular lamp posts, those just wide enough for safe landing with 'em. Others have lamp posts that can be easily taken down. Since all of 'em have wider than usual clearing from tree line, power lines and possible telephone lines are very close to edge of tree line, temporarily taking down power or telephone lines would be too much of a hassle. Also there is tends to be plenty of signs to be removed. Next thing in preparing a road base is setting up runway lights and signs. Last thing is clearing all foreign objects and on winter snow and ice. Due to all that it takes day or two prepare the road for operations.
Huge compliment to have somebody from Ukraine to call us tough. It is you guys who are the heroes of this century. And how I wish you wouldn't have to be. Slava Ukraini!!
Your Finnish pronunciation is quite good, usually native English speakers have trouble speaking Finnish because the pronunciation is so different. Spanish and Italian speakers have practically no trouble pronouncing Finnish words, in fact Finnish pronunciation is very similar to what linguists presume Classical Latin pronunciation was, strange coincidence.
Fr many Italian words are pronounced the exact same way in Finnish, you just need to spice up the rythm of the word. Like very easy one, Spagetti. Pronounce it Spageetti, add a little music to it and its near perfect Italian.
I do not think that Finnish language phonetic pronunciation is an accident. The father of Finnish book language, Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) was a very talented scholar and linguist who was proficient in German and Latin languages. He also did study Greek and those linguistic studies helped him to translate the Bible to the Finnish language and to create the Finnish book language.
@@FinnishDragonyeah but spoken Finnish is ages older than Acricola. Written Finnish has ofc had an effect on how we talk nowadays but it does not explain phonetics of Finnish.
Agricola only put Finnish grammar in the books. He collected em from speaked language. The way he wrote it, was very different from nowdays "latinpassing" finnish :) But still there is some point what you are saiyng. @@FinnishDragon 🙃Still for example, every Finnish letter is not still Latin alphapets. Like å, ä and ö. They are weirdomobs, even for Romans! ;D But yes agricola made specially an ABC book with Finnish in ACTUAL (for latin speaking better christian folk) letters. You must go to Turku library and read some Agricolas texts. They are hard as hell, even for finnish. And there even has been differences how ppl speak Finnish in Turku, where the bad christian folks were, and like in Paimio where christians were killed many times in times of Big Hatred (ej mu o hajuka onkk isoviha Big Hatred lontogs)
@@SportSoulLife Italy is very easy country to Finnish :D I didnt know any words, but they understand Finnish if you speak it like ITAAAAALIAN and wave your hands
Yeah thats right! My job at army was to refuel all kind of aircrafts at satakunnan lennosto! Hot refueling is just refueling with more strict safety measures basically!
The Finnish welcome was very easy to understand, 5/5. 3:10 The road bases are built for this purpose. No regular roads are that wide. 4:40 Hot refuel means refueling while the engine is running. 6:20 They have dedicated runway cleaning equipment as Hornets are very easily damaged by foreign objects. Snow and ice has to be dealt with too, of course.
Sweden have used roads for takeoff and landing airplanes since WWII. SAAB aircraft are specifically designed for this. They have the air intake placed higher to minimize debris from getting into the engine.
@@lintu25 They did not fight in WW2, no, but still prepared for the eventuality. At the time it was not totally unlikely that either Germany or the Soviet Union might use military force against Sweden.
@@lintu25 except over 10'000 Swedish army officers and conscripts were granted indefinite leave to join the Finnish army along with a third of the Swedish airforce... including their issued equipment and aircraft...🤫
@@Farksisten the soviets sunk the Gotland line ferry SS Hansa and conducted a number of "misnavigated" bombing raids of Swedish cities during the war...
It's great to see our Norwegian pilots gets to train on the highway landingstrips. We don't have them here in Norway. Or at least not by far as many as in Finland and Sweden. It's important to know how to operate on them now that Finland is a full member and Sweden about to becoming a full member of Nato. Finnish sisu!
multiple roads are made to support aircraft landings in norway, but never used in exersizes. they have to perform some prep on them tho, like clearing woodline close to the road or streetlights and signs. Was originaly designed during the F-5 and F-16 era. dont remember any road sections designed today that has re-enforced roads to support landings, but roads from that were built in the 80's and 90's for sure do.
Thanks for the reaction dude! 🤙 It was an amazing experience. The F35 was so loud, I could almost feel my soul leaving my body goddamn. The roads are reinforced and their locations planned out by the air force. But yeah they try to keep the staff to a minimum but like you said, it takes an effort to fly these things. Sweden at least does this aswell, and I think Poland just tried it aswell!
In Sweden and Finland we have many roadbases, as a GI In Sweden I maintained onekligen of them 30 yrs ago. The air trafic controler guided the aircraft down to the grond with motorbikes and the maintain groups where very mobile and could swift between different locations very fast so the enemy could not strike all of them at the same time, when the planes left so did the rest of the personel to prepare a different strip.
@@RadioactiveSaddam Still the Gripen is built for it (600m runways) and the airforce train for it. Today the use modular shiping containers for building up what structures are needed, which is packed on trucks and moved along. The old bases, Bas 60 and Bas 90, were built during a different reality and was scrapped during the mid -90s. They were kind of open secrets and pretty well mapped out by Soviet. There were a Bas 2000 program and there is a Bas 2018 program (quite intimitly linked with Flygsystem 2020 I would imagine). So even though the old bases are no more (at least in their original form) the tactic is still used and trained for, but the exactly how the new bases looks or where they are that is another quesrio. But there is much more wider roads today all over the country and I guess it would not take long to prepare a 600m 2+1 road to become usefull if need be...
Hot refueling is when you refuel without stopping the engine. Or switching off the aircraft. A normal refuel would be when the engine is switched off, and the aircraft is switched off completely. Switching on an aircraft takes a few minutes, like switching on a computer. It needs to make a number of safety checks, and calibrate its navigation system, and so on. So refueling without switching off saves time, but it also means you skip some of the checks. At least this is what I've been told, but I don't know for sure.
But yeah, those highway stretches are actually built ground up to be landing strips. With all the markings, parking, bunkers and shelters and so on. Seen some in Sweden also. Estonia had those during in Soviet times as well not far from where I live.
"Tervetuloa takaisin". Very well done! The road bases are indeed part of the regular road network in Finland, but built way wider than usual to provide additional runway. Some of those roads have quite busy traffic in our scale, so when they are used for military training, you need to take a detour and have to prepare some delays on your trip. Saw some Swedish comments about road bases, so I had to educate myself a little: the Swedish Saab Gripen was actually designed with the requirement to be able to operate it from roads with just 17x800 meters dimensions. Basically to make it more difficult to destroy their air force. Their design for road bases is called "bas 90". Couldn't really find a decent source for the runway requirements for F-35A.
And the 17×800m is for taking off with four planes, in pairs. Two planes side by side starting at one end, the other two starting in the middle, all four in the same direction.
The German autobahns also still have sections that can be rebuilt very quickly if there is a runway for military aircraft of any size. A remnant of the old Cold War. Now we have our new one.
Was going to mention that as well. Can spot them pretty easily when they are a) dead straight for like 2km+ b) have a paved center divider between the two directions with removable guard rails so heavy cargo planes can land as well and c) have these suspicious looking bus stop areas for the ground crews and logistics. Same principle but on a bigger scale.
I remember these widened road strips from back in the 80's when I was a small boy. They were designed for Saab Drakens at that time, and I remember my dad getting a kick gunning our family Saab 99 car as fast as it could go on those straight wide stretches of road, as they were a part of the public highway network.
There was a joint exercise in the northern sweden last summer where Norwegian F-35s practiced road landing, quick refueling/rearming and take-off alongside Gripens and finnish F-18s.
and Gripen is specifically designed to operate on the highway bases. Few airfields would be easy targets for the enemy so dispersing is essential tactics. Hot refueling keeps the turn around time short.
Yea it started with the Viggen, and they kept the concept with the Gripen.. Which is also why the E4 and E45 highways for example were build as they were.. Hard to destroy a landingstrip that goes throughout the whole country haha@@mapsiez
One of the requirements of the Viggen or Draken or something (probably Gripen also) is to land on "road bases" like in this exercise so this is something we do in Sweden as well.
To my knowledge, yes, the Gripen is designed to be able to operate off unimproved runways /roads, as well as being maintained by largely inexperienced ground crews supervised by a specialist (who might even be the pilot). The relative ease of maintenance along with the ability to take off and land from unimproved runways is one of the major reasons the Gripen was so strongly considered for supplying to Ukraine vs the f16.
@@restitvtororbis5330 Nope, it ain't pilot, it is professional aircraft mechanic that will actually do all the harder stuff that conscript assistant mechanics can't do. That is where Swedish air force shot itself in foot big time when Sweden got rid of conscription in 2010. They simply couldn't pay for all the bodies they needed to maintain fighters designed around conscript assistant mechanics doing all the simpler maintenance work and lifting when it comes to rearming the plane. Since then they have reinstated conscription, but while there wasn't conscription, probably more Swedish fighter pilots have gotten their road base operations qualifications done in Finland. Due to professional army they didn't have enough infantry do traffic management and guard duties for air force road base exercises. What is strange about this video is that there isn't Gripens around, that those have been around in Finnish air force road base pretty much every single time since 2010. Road bases aren't really regular roads, there is plenty of reinforcement to road and what is under the asphalt. Slamming things that weight several tons at high speed on normal highway would ruin it pretty fast.
Hot refueling is keeping the engine running while refueling. A jet engine takes time to spool up and ready for a flight with oil pressures needing to spool up, engine temperature needs to be warmed up and such, so keeping the engine running can help the plane quickly back up into the fight again.
Hey we don't all speak rally English here.😃 Great video as always. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk about our small but majestic country. lol
Here in Norway we have been doing shortfield ops with our Vipers for almst 40 years, the vipers was retired in 2022, and now we are F-35's exclusivly. I served as a viper tech in the mid 90's and we had exersises where we landed the Viper on a 800 meter runway , the needed about 500 m to stop using dragshute and brakes. We had to change the tires , and had some limits on how much fuel we could fill on the refuel, but aside from that it was totally posseble. As for the F-35 , we have installed dragshutes on the Panthers. I have yet to see the same shortfield ops with these as I did with the F-16's . The Finns and Swedes has had roadbases sinse the "dawn of time". In Sweden I've seen Viggens and Gripens land on a short strech of road, get refuled , rearmed and take off again. These jets are made for this kind of ops. The finns did the same with the Drakens, and in later years using a portable arresting gear setup with their Hornets. Also really cool to watch.
@@phillipbanes5484 heavy hard on a rough surface and the pilot had to "stand" on the breaks. the tires where rags after that. During these kinda ops there where limits on weight on landing naturally as the runway was very short indeed. And just a third of their usual strech. So it did take its toll on the aircraft. But we pulled it off, And it was a signifigant part of our operations.
I would imagine hot refuel means not shutting the engines. Starting jet engines is a whole procedure, having it run on idle makes things much faster and you don't need to put the equipment needed to restart the engine to the road.
We used to have that road base system here in Sweden as well, from the 1960's or so. But we stopped using them after the fall of the Soviet Union, at "the end of history". But we have started rebuilding the system now. I used to live about a mile away from one of those wider, straighter strips of road. Called "flygraka" in everyday Swedish, meaning "airplane straight" or something. Not quite airstrip, but something like it. I found out only a few years ago that some of my friends who knew of the term "flygraka" had no idea at all that those parts of road were actually airstrips! They thought the word just was some slang for an unusually wide and flat and straight road. They didn't realize it was built like that for a purpose!
Standard procedure in Sweden and Finland with roadlanding and take off. Part of the idea to make it tough for an enemy to take out the airforce through bombing airbases
They build sections of the Road double wide, so two lane becomes as wide as a four lane but only the middle two are used in normal use. For emergency landing reasons in the US Interstates have a Straight 3-6 miles section every so many miles.
There is a guide on building these road bases available online. It is called Lentokoneiden varalaskupaikat and it is available in the vaylapilvi. It's in Finnish, but the schematics one might be able to understand. There was actually a temporary traffic sign noting the start of a cleaned area visible in the video.
Tervetuolla! They have wide (100 ft +) lengths of highways scattered around the country for this purpose. Drive over the crest of a hill and suddenly the road is 100 ft wide for a couple miles. Michigan Air Guard has exercised in Michigan doing the same thing with A10's on normal 2 lane highways.
You might prefer the B variant of the plane, but it all comes down to capabilities which are most suitable for different operators of the plane. For fast fighter interception missions the B and C variants are not as well performing platforms when compared to the A variant, because of the relatively short supersonic speed capabilities of the variants. All of the variants perform brilliantly when they operate in the conditions and roles they were designed for and they will outperform 4th generation fighters any day of the week, when operating within their intended operating doctrines.
I think for finland /Norway /Sweden there is a lot of training done to ensure that most of their military aircraft are able to take off and land on roads /unimproved runways. Meaning that they are able to do this procedure with Saab Gripen, FA 18 hornets, and now (apparently) F35 A. This is good because, while the F35B can take off and land vertically, as you said it has a lot less fuel capacity and performance than the f35A (and is over 20m more expensive) so if they can land an f35A reliably they don't need to buy the F35B. The F35C I believe is only useful for aircraft carriers (catapult launch and wire assist landing) so i doubt they would consider that model anyway.
@@restitvtororbis5330 I know that the road base based operations are a vital part of our airforce operations and it's a thing which we train regularly all of the time. Considering the fact that we now have a unified nordic air defence, it's vital that all of our and our partner nations current and future aircrafts can operate from them.
There's one of these road bases in the town I grew up in and my dad used to take me to watch our newly acquired F-18s practise operating from that base. That specific base has a second landing strip that runs along the main road that would also be used during war and more infrastructure in the woods.
m05 looks really good on u mate. i have been folowing ur videos for long time now and enjoying ur content about finland and other countries as well. keep it going mate.
Germany did this also for a long time. That was often part of the bigger NATO exercises like Able Archer 1983. On RU-vid are quite a few Bundeswehr Classix about landing on the Autobahn including US Planes.
Your Finnish speaking was close to perfection! Just go ahead! I am watching this video on the same day that the DCA agreement between the United States and Finland has been finalized. NATO was of course a great thing, but this agreement ensures the existence of our bilateral security environment. You are always welcome here!
6:20 Surfaces on public roads when used as airfields are vacuumed basically with a vacuum truck. After that group walk to pick up if something is left. Google scania airfield vacuum truck :) Those are beast... Will never forget one friday afternoon in the army. Vacuuming Rovaniemi airporft runway in a thunderstorm. Rovaniemi airport is one of those in Finland that have clean and dirty sides. Its of course because it's half military airport. Everywhere that planes go is clean side. edit: early in the video you could see a sign on the ground. Puhdas alue (clean area).
Greetings from 🇫🇮👋🏼 0:38 i could definetly understand what you said, even tho native english speakers usually tend to have pretty hard time to correctly vocalize K and A letters like we Finns do. 🤘🏼
I got to experience hearing and seeing the Eurofighter typhoon and F35 earlier this year in a airshow in the UK, and my god you can internally feel everything vibrate.
Where in UK was the airshow? I went to Waddington the last time they did it, I went for the weekend and loved it but I can't remember if typhoon was there, f16 was and vulcan was what most people seemed to enjoy they make a deafening noise and fly over so slow it looks like it could fall out of the sky.
That's the rumbling of afterburner/re-heat. It also feels as vibration of ground. But often there seems to be noise limits in airshows not allowing use of full afterburner. Best candidates would be planes with lots of engine power and strong afterburner like F-15. Also Eurofighter has very powerfull engines: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RJFS9VZ94dw.html B-1 would be another good one with doubled amount and more powerfull than in F-15 engines.
first time i didnt realize its even finnish, but second time i listened and you are good at it. idk why first it sounded weird haha. terveiset suomesta
Oh, you have Varusteleka's Jääkäripuukko! It's the best knife I've ever owned. A real sturdy tool made for real use. I love the handle and the leather sheath as well.
as far as i know, the swedish also use these kinds of road airbases with their gripens fighters, and those fighters are designed for that kind of use precisely
Countries who do this usually map out all of the roads that are capable of this. For example the US has mapped out all the checked every road in the America and Canada and have just recently started training to do these operations. I can say for Norway but I know Sweden also makes extensive use of these road bases.
The intro was good enough that my brain wasn't sure what was happening at the start, while understanding everything but it not feeling like it was english, before realising that it was finnish
totally agree, that it takes a special sort of person to become a military jet pilot. Lots and lots of training. I often watch F-35s land and take off from the Yuma Marine Corps Airstation, they are very loud but I love that sound and what it represents.
Sweden was the first in the world to use roadways as an airbase, they started sometime in the 1960s with that method, Sweden had the 4th strongest air force in the world once upon a time. 🇸🇪👋
You mentioned potentially throwing off rubble/trash and needing to sweep the road. At 3:00 the yellow sign actually says "cleaned area" so I am guessing it is referring to that.
I know some wide roads around Finland and those have made like for aircraft emergency landing areas and also Military can use those also when necessary. Hot refueling means that aircraft engines are running all time.
Singapore has been doing something similar since 1986 as well. Called "Exercise Torrent" it is basically an "alternative runway exercise" or "emergency runway exercise" as it was know as in the earlier years. Here's a link to a video of the most recent (7th) iteration of the exercise back in 2016: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XD7Regn8eW4.html
That sign at the beginning "puhdistettu alue" translates to "cleaned zone". I figure they used a street sweeper to remove loose gravel and the sorts from the road surface.
I remember in the early days of Google Earth, I was looking at satellite images of places I know and most of them were very low quality. Then I noticed that suddenly a seemingly random part of forest had really hi-def super accurate pictures and then I realized that it was one of these runway roads.
Every piece of Finnish public infrastructure, be it a road, a bridge or a house, has been built with a view to its importance in preventing and dealing with a possible Russian invasion.
