On this day 25 years ago (Commentary Thread)

[chico20854]

Originally Posted by Matt Wiser

A nit that nobody in Canon picked up: there is no Al Qatif AB. The closest field to that town is King Fahd IAP to the west (about 15 miles). Either that, or Dhahran RSAFB/IAP. I have a set of TPC charts for the Gulf region and Iran, and I'm surprised GDW's writers didn't notice there was no base (King Fahd IAP was under construction when RDF Sourcebook was published-it hosted A-10s in 1990-91 during ODS but was a bare base). CVW-10 could go to either King Fahd or to Dhahran if in Saudi, or to Sheikh Isa in Bahrain.

I did actually look at that, sorry I didn't explain. Supposedly the (unfinished in 1996) King Fahd IAP is technically located in the "city limits" of Al Qatif. I took the liberty of re-styling that into GDW's Al Qatif Air Base. My concept is that the pair of 13,000 runways were complete (as at least a portion of them had been used in ODS, as you noted, and with several more years that is, I believe, reasonable) and the other infrastructure (tower, power, water, fuel pipelines) had been largely completed by 1996 when things started looking hairy across the way in Iran. The US and Saudis secretly agreed to shift the construction of the civil airport into an alternate headquarters for 9th Air Force. The terminal building construction was halted, the materials, equipment and workforce being redirected into a number of dispersed, hardened facilites, the partially completed terminal building re-puposed to housing administrative and support functions as well as housing. As 1996 wears on some of these facilities are filled with prepositioned equipment, as mentioned more generally in RDF SB.

My master map of airfields is here!