Vanisle_BC
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Location: Port Alberni, B.C. Canada, Zone 7 (+?)

Land a bomber on trodden-down snow?

So @Gary, here's something for you to research. My wife was reading a 'secret agent' war story and in it a crowd of people stamped down an area of deep snow so that a bomber could land on it. The plane in the story was a Wellington 'on wheels' - no skis. Wellingtons had a geodesic frame of thin wood covered with fabric. A pretty lightweight structure but still .. it had 2 big engines plus fuel, undercarriage & other heavy gear.

So could this work? How solid can you compact deep snow under a human foot; could there be enough pressure to melt the snow & let it freeze into thick ice? If not, the plane might run OK on the trodden snow while it still had some speed & lift, but as it slowed, maybe it would dig into the snow and nose over.

Does the story stretch credibility a bit too far? It's fun to think about.

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Location: Amherst, MA USDA Zone 5a

Plowing deep snow with a snow shovel is hard work. It takes my wife and I about two hours to plow our driveway, which is a fraction of the width of a runway. It would take the two of us at least twelve to fourteen hours to shovel out the same length of road plus the width of a runway.

Seems like a crowd of people with no shovel would need several days to a week to do it without shovels and perhaps an entire day to clear a runway to do it with shovels.

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Gary350
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Vanisle_BC wrote:
Thu Aug 12, 2021 5:10 pm
So @Gary, here's something for you to research. My wife was reading a 'secret agent' war story and in it a crowd of people stamped down an area of deep snow so that a bomber could land on it. The plane in the story was a Wellington 'on wheels' - no skis. Wellingtons had a geodesic frame of thin wood covered with fabric. A pretty lightweight structure but still .. it had 2 big engines plus fuel, undercarriage & other heavy gear.

So could this work? How solid can you compact deep snow under a human foot; could there be enough pressure to melt the snow & let it freeze into thick ice? If not, the plane might run OK on the trodden snow while it still had some speed & lift, but as it slowed, maybe it would dig into the snow and nose over.

Does the story stretch credibility a bit too far? It's fun to think about.
There is a big difference between, fiction and true store books. I think it was P.T. Barnum that said, you can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people sometimes. If the story is fiction it sounds good that a group of people can stamp down snow so an airplane can land. In the real world some times snow is dry powder and other times its wet slush and everything in between. Its not possible to stamp down dry powder, been there, tried that. It is easy to ride a bicycle through dry powder snow while slush it like riding in mud. Google says, snow is comprised of 90 to 95 percent trapped air. If conditions are right it is possible to stamp snow down 90 to 95%.



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