I love the myth floating in Canada by the 3P’s (press, politicians, public) that RCAF fighters can fly off short unprepared roads in the Canadian Arctic.
Landing speed is the whole problem. Most 4th and 5th gen fighters touch down around 150 knots — 278 km/h. The only exceptions are aircraft built for carriers: F-35B (STOVL), Rafale, Super Hornet, F-35C. The F-15, F-16, Eurofighter, F-35A and Gripen all land at roughly that same 150 knots clean — that’s without external fuel, or carrying any weapons. Add a combat load and that speed climbs well past 275 km/h. That’s Formula 1 territory. Watch Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” or Brad Pitt’s F1 movie — those tires are purpose-built compounds, not the winter and summer treads on your car. A fighter tire has to absorb that impact at touchdown, spin up instantly, and survive repeated hard braking, all on a surface engineered to spec. An unprepared highway isn’t that surface.
Why the standard European runways are 8,000 feet, not shorter? At 275+ km/h on touchdown, you need distance — real distance — to bleed off energy through aerodynamic braking, spoilers, wheel brakes and in some cases drag chutes without exceeding tire and brake thermal limits. Shorten the runway and you don’t get a shorter landing; you get a tire and brake failure. NATO 8,000-foot European standard isn’t arbitrary — it’s built from the physics of stopping a jet at those speeds, with margin.
Hydroplaning. Every one of these aircraft hydroplanes on a wet runway until it slows well below landing speed — that’s basic tire-contact-patch physics, not a design flaw. Water pressure under the tire exceeds the tire’s ability to displace it, and the aircraft is riding on a film of water with reduced braking and steering authority. That’s why wet-runway distances are longer than dry, and why prepared surfaces — crowned, grooved, drained — exist in the first place. A highway isn’t grooved for that.
Snow and ice. Now put that same aircraft on an icy, narrow Canadian highway. Braking friction coefficient on ice can drop to a fraction of what it is on dry pavement — sometimes below 0.1. At 275 km/h, that’s not a landing, that’s a controlled skid with no controlled outcome. There’s no anti-lock braking that turns physics off. That’s a 40,000 lbs curling rock.
Mud, too. Fighter jets can’t operate off muddy surfaces either — contrary to the public musings of an MP in Ottawa. Soft ground doesn’t support the point-loading of a fighter’s gear.
For every non-RCAF person reading this: there is zero concept of operations planning for a Canadian fighter to ever land on unprepared highway surfaces in North America. Scandinavia and parts of Europe, yes — with dedicated, engineered highway strips built for exactly that purpose. Canada, no.
Basic weight, tire pressure, and braking friction. Not American or European marketing. Just Canadian math.
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