It s 3,500 feet long and has almost no markings. The strip will be used mostly at night with crews wearing night-vision goggles. The lighting capabilities make this landing strip special, according to Hayes. With the flick of a switch from Duke Field s control tower or from a landing zone officer s control panel, the lights can be seen with or without night-vision goggles. It has two standard airfield marking patterns that pilots are trained to land on.
Crews can also practice blacked out landings, where no type of lighting is provided.
Aircrews must use their instruments and visually find the runway at night without the aid of lights. The advantage of the new strip is that instead of being a mile out on a landing approach and looking for a long strip as wide as a football field, now we have to find the small highway-sized landing strip, said Hayes. Aircrews have to be confident with that.