CallMeAlan.uk

Greenham Common : The Runway

As you can see from the satellite picture of the Common on the index page, the runway - or what remains of it - pretty well dominates the Common. Indeed, it would be a pretty odd airfield that wasn't dominated by its runway(s). The old runway was massive, over two miles in length, and very wide, and thus able to accommodate the most massive of cargo planes and bombers. There were extensive and large parking aprons dotted about.

When they decided, after the Cold War, to demolish the airbase, one of the objects they left behind undemolished was the central crossover of the runway, and that's what I'm going to try to show you here. I say try, because it's not that easy to photograph a large flat piece of the earth from just 6 feet above it, but I've tried.

I've included here a mention of the old PAPI light installations.


This is a Google Earth picture of the crossover









What remains of a light. The glass bubble has long gone.

Another light. In this one some of the yellow structure has survived the years

A brief mention of what was once the PAPI lighting. This was a mechanism using red and white lights to indicate to incoming pilots the correctness or otherwise of their altitude during the descent. I'd spotted these intriguing white area on Google Earth and had to investigate

Unfortunately .... nothing to see here, move along! Everything has been taken away, and the remainder has been covered in white gravel. This is just one of the four old PAPIs; they're all gone now