Taszár Air Base
Encyclopedia
Taszár Air Base is a military air base located near Taszár
Taszár
Taszár is a village in Somogy county, Hungary.The Taszár Air Base located here.The village structure of the traditional Hungarian village were radically changed in the 1950s when they built the military air base. The military objects occupy a significant part of the town. This is particularly the...

, a village in Somogy county, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...

. It is 10 kilometres (10,000,000,000,000 nm) east of Kaposvár.

Overview

Taszár Air Base was a Soviet airfield during the Cold War, but it became the primary staging post for peacekeeping forces coming and going into the Balkans in December 1995. It was the closest airfield to the Balkans capable of landing strategic aircraft, with good rail and road links.

The base then evolved into the first site for unmanned Predator aircraft missions, a rest and recreation site for Balkan based soldiers, a training ground for armored units and a home base for aircraft that made reconnaissance and bombing runs to stop ethnic-cleansing in Kosovo.

In more recent times it hosted the largest special operations exercise in Europe and served as the site for training the Free Iraqi Forces that would go on to help liberate Iraq. The U.S. flag was lowered on NATO's first military base in former Warsaw Pact territory as the American presence there came to an end in a ceremony on 30 June 2004. The overall successes of the Peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo and the smaller number of soldiers required there eliminated the need for the Taszar facility.

As of April 2011, it is reported "disused".

Facilities

The air base is at an elevation
Elevation
The elevation of a geographic location is its height above a fixed reference point, most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational surface ....

 of 156 metres (512 ft) above mean sea level. It has one runway
Runway
According to ICAO a runway is a "defined rectangular area on a land aerodrome prepared for the landing and take-off of aircraft." Runways may be a man-made surface or a natural surface .- Orientation and dimensions :Runways are named by a number between 01 and 36, which is generally one tenth...

 designated 16/34 with an concrete
Concrete
Concrete is a composite construction material, composed of cement and other cementitious materials such as fly ash and slag cement, aggregate , water and chemical admixtures.The word concrete comes from the Latin word...

 surface measuring 2500 by 70 m (8,202.1 by 229.7 ).

External links

  • Taszár Air Base at GlobalSecurity.org
    GlobalSecurity.org
    GlobalSecurity.org, launched in 2000, is a public policy organization focusing on the fields of defense, space exploration, intelligence, weapons of mass destruction and homeland security...




The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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