Snow made the runway black
Gazette and Herald
www.gazetteandherald.co.uk
12th February 2009 pg10
Personnel at RAF Lyneham did their best to keep runways open and Hercules aircraft flying on Friday, despite the bad weather.

The Met Office recorded 6cm of snow at their base in Lyneham and a team of 40 people worked shifts around the clock to clear snow and ice from the airfield.

Senior operations officer Flight Lieutenant Steve Beresford said: "We were aware that it was going to snow heavily as we get hourly Met forecasts, but we just could not keep on top of the snow that was falling. I think the whole country has found it worse than expected and people at Lyneham are saying this is the worst snow they have seen for 15 years or so."

Lyneham is one of the largest and busiest operational stations in the, RAF, but some of the famous fleet of Hercules aircraft remained grounded on Thursday and Friday as diversion runways could not be found elsewhere in the UK.

Flt Lt Beresfield said: "Our runway went black - that means it is unusable - along with Brize Norton and a few others.

"We did cancel a small number of sorties, not solely on our conditions here, but also as we could not get two diversion airfields. This is a requirement of sorties that fly from here and most of the rest of the country was covered in the white stuff.

"We did remain open and had sorties departing and returning from theatre.

"We lost some local sorties but that was not necessarily because we could not fly.

'I could not put a definite figure on it but I know that some flights also had to be cancelled because the crew could not get in."

While the personnel at the base did their best to clear the snow, their families made the most of the snow. Lyneham Primary School was closed for most of the week and children filled their time with sledging and snowball fights.