By Benedict Brook, News.com.au:
To the untrained eye, there’s nothing remarkable about the A44 autobahn in central Germany, the motorway that links the industrial and heavily populated Rhine-Ruhr region to the country’s heartland.
However, near the small town of Buren, the road, ever so subtly, begins to change to serve its secret — and chilling — second purpose.
At this spot, the A44 doubles as a secret military runway ready and waiting for war to be declared.
Called highway strips, these motorways have been specifically designed so if a country’s air bases are taken out, fighter jets can still take to the skies.
The road’s usual gentle curves die away and are replaced by dead straights; the grassy median strip disappears, uncovering a center runway line. And, off to the side, what looks like a large parking lot is actually an aircraft parking bay.
Germany is not alone in having highway strips. They also exist, equally unnoticed, in Switzerland, Poland, Singapore, Taiwan and Finland.
Australia too has a small number of roads that, in just moments, can be turned into runways.
The latest country to sign up for roads-turned-runways is India. Last year, the country’s transport minister, Nitin Gadkari, said they could be a boon for civilian air travel.
“We can close road traffic when a plane lands and open once the plane has taken off. Airport investment costs would come down as the road will also be used as an airstrip,” he told Bloomberg.
But Srikanth Ramakrishnan, a journalist with Swarajya magazine, pondered whether a military use was more likely. Indeed, in 2015, an Indian Mirage jet landed on a motorway outside Delhi.
“In the border areas in Arunachal Pradesh [province], which Gadkari has mentioned in his plan, airstrips could be built for the air force to use in case of, say, a Chinese incursion.”
First established during the Cold War, highway strips took advantage of Germany’s pioneering autobahn network.
