Red Horse keeps planes landing at Kandahar

  • Published
  • By Maj. David Kurle
  • 455th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan (AFPN) --  Runways are essential to any air operation and many of the airfields in Afghanistan, used in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, need improvements.

The runway here is being refurbished by cutting it in half length-wise, with crews repairing one side while aircraft land and take off on the other. With the first half complete, construction crews are working on the next stage.

In order to use the now-completed side of the runway, lighting was required to keep the airfield open at night, and that job fell to the 1st Expeditionary Red Horse Group.

Master Sgt. Richard Brown, a Red Horse infrastructure supervisor, leads a team of six Airmen deployed to Bagram Air Base. The team traveled to Kandahar in southwest Afghanistan to install an emergency airfield lighting system to keep the planes landing.

A typical installation requires one to two days, but because the team needed to bolt the lights to a concrete runway, the job took just over one week.

“Airfield concrete is harder concrete than normal, so drilling the holes is a lot tougher,” Sergeant Brown said.

The team also needed to overcome parts shortages and a lack of materials that comes with operating in remote locations like Kandahar.

“Simple stuff like (not having) a screw can hold up an entire project,” he said.

The team overcame the problem by switching to different kinds of screws, which were scrounged from around the base by Airmen deployed here to the 451st Expeditionary Civil Engineer Flight.

“We get the job done with the limited resources we have,” said Capt. Matt Altman, 451st ECEF commander.

The assistance from the Red Horse team was crucial for air operations to continue during the ongoing construction, Captain Altman said.

“We’re constantly doing runway repairs and without Red Horse doing the lighting system, we couldn’t have done the runway swap,” he said.