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Keep 'Em Flying

Charley Company's Steel Workers replace matting on the Marine's SATS Runway.

The SATS Runway in Chu Lai, base for MAG 13 and 14 and their flights of  A-4 Skyhawk fighters. Seabees from Charley Company are replacing sections of steel matting.

Keeping the Marine A-4 Jets Flying

Just over the hill, a half-mile behind our camp, is a 1,200 meter long SATS (Short Airfield Tactical Support) runway. MCB-10 laid down that strip in 1965, when they came ashore with the Marines to secure Chu Lai. This runway is still in operation, and now home to two Marine detachments of A-4 Skyhawk fighters. These wasp-looking jets screamed on take off, and as they cleared the hill that separated us from them, they are so loud you can’t hear yourself talking.

     A jettisoned bomb from a departing A4 early that morning had blown a hole in the matting. “The strip will be shut down while the boys replace the matting,” Tuffy Lake, the head Engineer Assistant with our outfit explained to me. “Wade and his crew are out there every other day.” The strip is not concrete, like the main Chu Lai runway, but built with inter-locking aluminum planks and steel matts, to create a smooth surface for landing and take off.

     “This runway takes a pounding,” Tuffy continued to  explanation to this ignorant Journalist. “Landing heavy jet fighters every hour, at 140 mph, is bad enough.  Occasionally a plane will lose a bomb on take off, like this morning.  

      The resulting explosion rips up a whole section of the strip. There’s an occasional crash landing which tears up even more runway. Temperature expansion and contraction warps the metal matts, creating dimples in the subsoil. When the rain comes, there’ll be erosion of the sub grade at the edges of the runway. All this needs our attention. Chief Steelworker Dick Wade and his crew from Charlie Company have been given the task of keeping these two strips operational,” he said.

     The weekly rocket and mortar attacks that hit the strip can’t help either, I thought to myself.

     Seabees from Charley Company were pulling out an aluminum alloy Zipper plank; 12 feet long, two feet wide, by an inch and a half thick, weighing 144 pounds. These Zipper Plates holds the larger matts together, these are made of steel planks, fitted together, into 150 feet long by 70 feet wide sections, each weighing several tons. Once the Zippier Plank is removed, three machines drag the matt out of the way,  the soil underneath is replaced, packed, smoothed and the matts and Zipper plates moved back into position.

     This gets repeated every few days. Good thing we were just a short hop over the hill.

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