The myth won’t die. The 3P’s keep pointing to dispersed runway operations — Canadian fighters landing on northern roads, the way you’d see in Scandinavia or across Europe — as another argument for a mixed fleet.
I’m not a civil engineer; my background is mechanical and aerospace engineering. But I’ve driven roads in the far north, landed jets on very narrow surfaces, and watched taxiway and runway resurfacing projects fail in real time. I know how hard this actually is.
What a real dispersed runway requires
NATO once designated a stretch of autobahn between CFB Baden-Söllingen and CFB Lahr in southern Germany as a dispersed runway: a four-lane highway with the center median paved over, plus taxiways built into both ends so jets could clear the highway once slowed, then taxi back on after being refueled and re-armed. I drove that “highway runway” often and pictured how it would have been used in combat. That’s as far as it ever got — I never once heard of anyone actually practicing on it.
But the design tells you something important. Every video you’ve ever seen of fighters landing on highway strips shows the same setup: a four-lane road, median paved flat, taxiways engineered into both ends. That’s not a road. That’s a runway built to look like one.
The road doesn’t fit the jet
Now measure a Canadian road. I went out this summer and measured the lanes near where I live, outside Tobermory, Ontario: 12 feet per lane, plus an 8-foot shoulder for cyclists — 40 feet, curb to curb. Strip out the bike lane and you’re often down to a 1-foot shoulder. Let’s be generous and call it 4 feet for shoulders. That leaves 32 feet to land on.
A CF-18’s wingspan is 40 feet. An F-35A’s is 35 feet.
Do the math on what’s left over. Nothing.
And landing is only the start. Every jet after the first either has to roll far enough to clear the strip for the one behind it or taxi off onto a side road. Skip that step, and a brake failure doesn’t just take out one jet — it takes out everything lined up behind it like curling rocks.
The pavement can’t take the load
This is where the civil engineering comes in. The small, ultra-high-pressure tires on a fighter jet put a load on the surface that ordinary roads were never built for. I’ve seen it firsthand on a number of occasions when airfields resurfaced a taxiway or runway, the contractor doesn’t account for that load, and the jets sink into the pavement — forcing the contractor back to do the whole job over again.
Turning a roadway into a landing strip isn’t a matter of paving over what’s there. It takes purpose-built engineering to survive the landings — not to full runway standard, but well beyond anything in a normal Canadian road contract. Add the frost heave of a Canadian winter, and the cracking and rupturing that comes with it, and you’re no longer looking for a straight stretch of road. You’re looking at a serious civil engineering project.
The pilot has no margin for error
A standard European runway is 8,000 feet long and 100 feet wide. I’ve landed a jet on a 50-foot taxiway with no margin left or right of centerline. None. That was in daylight, dry, no crosswind.
Ask any flight instructor who’s ever screamed at a student not landing on the centerline of a runway twice that width whether pilots reliably land dead center. They can’t — not even on a good day, on a real runway. Can the F-35’s amazing flight control logic help? Yes. But that doesn’t make a narrow surface any more forgiving.
Yes, there are straight roads in Canada. You could find one in Saskatchewan and land there. But who wants to go to Saskatchewan — and what would you do once you got there?
For anyone who’s never actually been to the far north: there are straight roads. They’re just not four-lane roads. Period. That leaves fighters landing on a surface narrower than their own wingspan, at 250 km/h, likely carrying weapons and extra fuel — because you’d still need diversion fuel on board — with soft shoulders of sand and loose rock on either side. There is no margin for error.
Verdict
Dispersed operations on northern roads work in Scandinavia and Germany because the roads are engineered for it: roads made to act as temporary runways. Canada has none of that. Here, it’s a myth. No one in the RCAF takes it seriously. It just makes for good marketing.
Next time: the logistics of actually managing a dispersed runway in the north.
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