Perry Mick wrote:

Just read this in Machine Design:

"The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in
every five must be straight.  These straight sections are usable
as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies."

Another Urban Legend.  See, for example:

http://www.snopes2.com/autos/law/airstrip.htm

Claim:   The American interstate highway system was designed to be used for
emergency airstrips in case of war.

Status:   False.

Origins:   Numerous folks swear Interstate highways in the United States
must be designed so that one mile in every five is perfectly straight and
flat.  According to this whispered bit of facetious lore, if the U.S. ever
comes under attack, those straight, flat stretches will be used as landing
strips.

Richard Weingroff, information liaison specialist for the Federal Highway
Administration's Office of Infrastructure and the FHA's unofficial
historian, says the closest any of this came to touching base with reality
was in 1944, when Congress briefly considered the possibility of including
funding for emergency landing strips in the Federal Highway-Aid Act (the law
that authorized designation of a "National System of Interstate Highways").
At no point was the idea kited of using highways or other roads to land
planes on; the proposed landing strips would have been built alongside major
highways, with the highways serving to handle ground transportation access
to and from these strips. The proposal was quickly dropped, and no more was
ever heard of it.

Some references to the one-mile-in-five assertion claim it's part of the
Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This piece of legislation committed the
federal government to build what became the 42,800-mile Eisenhower
Interstate Highway System, which makes it the logical item to cite
concerning regulations about how the interstate highway system was to be
laid out. The act did not, however, contain any "one-in-five" requirement,
nor did it even suggest the use of stretches of the interstate system as
emergency landing strips. The one-out-of-five rule was not part of any later
legislation either.

At least two countries do use some of their roads as military air strips:
Korea and Sweden.

Barbara "strip mauled" Mikkelson

Last updated:   30 October 2000

The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/airstrip.htm

Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2001
by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
This material may not be reproduced without permission

Sources:
The Miama Herald.   "Nation's Interstate Highways Exemplify Bumps in
Freedom's Road."  The Tampa Tribune.   9 July 1996   (p. 7).

Weingroff, Richard.   "One Mile in Five: Debunking the Myth."
Public Roads.   May 2000.

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