Mamaia airfield

On 18th August I talked to Lucaci Mihai, I specifically asked him about the position of the airfield - how close it was to the sea - he said it was right near the beach, one could land his plane then run to the sea side (so it must be somewhere around 1 ~ 2 Km), also he said something rather interesting: most of the times they would land facing the sea due to the wind whichwas blowing from the sea towards the shore, very rare it happened the other way around (this contradicts certain book where almost every time pilots would land from the sea towards the land ).


PS: I also asked him about the ship escort missions, he said he never performed such mission and was quite convinced other pilots didn't either. Does anyone have documents which show such missions were performed ?

This post has been edited by D13-th_Mytzu on September 16, 2005 06:54 pm

Lucaciu also said that he never hear of IAR 80 crashed near the shore!

Yup and if I remember corectly this is the moment when he mentioned the landing direction, Cipiamon told mr. Lucaci that the IAR that crashed in the sea was on his final aproach so mr. Lucaci said it is not likely because they were landing from the land towards the sea and not vice-versa.

Usually the 46th and 49th Squadrons of the 4th Fighter Group performed such escorts in 1943. They were located at Cetatea Alba and Yevpatoria and better positioned to cover the convoys, than the 52nd, which was at the end of the sea route.

So Lucaci was right - his squadron never performed such duties ?

So, are u still trying to find the runway, or are u convinced it's in that yellow box?

imo, makes good sense it would be a right angle to the ocean.

For what its worth, around here, (U.S. East coast) all the oceanside airstrips were built with the primary runway at right angle to the water, to facilitate landing into the prevailing winds, which are most often blowing in off the water.

I learned at such a strip, and most pilots I know around there say it's a better day when you can land from the ocean than takeoff toward it. As, guess where u are going in the event of an "engine out" on climbout?

In any event, for some reason, u end up doing plenty of approaches in over the water, as very frequently, u do get offshore wind condition here.
(wind blowing off the land)

I have NO idea what its like there, but I sure would like to find out.... Looks like a great place to fly (lots of open flat fields close inland, and a pretty coastline).

cheers.

I would like to point out that in WW2, Constantza would have been much, much, smaller.
In the few maps from the period I have, the city seems to be only about a quarter of its current size, and most buildings are concentrated in the peninsula and southern part of town (a popular neighborhood called "La Vii"- it ran along the railway to Mangalia, and was torn down and replaced in the early '60s when the new Railway Station was built. My grandmother inhabits a flat on the 8th floor in the area, and she has a stunning view of the harbour.) On the north side, there were numerous military barracks (some, like those of the "Dobrogea" Fire Brigade survive to this day) as well as an entire neighborhood built for the families of the soldiers enrolled here. This state of affairs prevented any growth of the city limits in that direction until the early 1960s, when most of the military instalations were demolished, allowing the town to expand northwards by a whooping 5 kilometers.

Also, having lived almost 20 years in Constantza, I was amazed to learn the locations of both the Mamaia airfield and the Hydro hangars are not common knowledge...
As a kid obsessed with aviation, I visited them countless times. The airfield was indeed located in the area pointed out by Freak, and was used sporadically until the construction of the "Dunarea-Marea Neagra Channel" (Sometime in the '60s my granfather flew a Fiesler 156 Storch from this field to some villages in the Danube Delta to deliver some medical supplies), and the hydro hangars can still be found on the south-western shore of the lake, as apparent in the enclosed sattelite photo.



Right now I am in Bucharest, but next week I will be going home, and, weather permitting, I will bring back some photos of the old hangars to post on the forum.

This post has been edited by Wings_of_wrath on February 05, 2006 09:43 am

I saw several photographs of Mamaia Airfield at Dan Antoniu but I do not have his permission to post them, however from what I see in those pics, the airfield basically strached all the way to the beach. So if you look at this pic and increase the square represnting the airfield all the way to the shore, you should get an accurate ideea:

Ugh. That is not exactly right.
Although the rectangle is located in the right area, the actual airstrip would have looked more like this:



In fact, if you look closely, you can still see in the satelite picture the faint outline of the airfield, with the hangars located in the south west corner. When you measure this imprint, it seems to match the descriptions of the field's dimensions and layaout (two hangars, located on the south-western edge of the strip and the field itself measuring roughly 1050X900m- please note that scale on Google Earth varies slightly, so the outline presumed earlier was in fact too small)

Also, at this particular spot the coastline has been steadily advancing into the sea courtesy of the marine currents (in other places like 2 Mai or Vama Veche it is actually receding), and back in 1940 would probably have been where I drew the red line- there is a faint feature there in the photograph, although I'm not sure that was indeed an earlier coastline and not just an irigations ditch or some similar unrelated depression.

Are you sure about that costal line? I know in the area of the hotels in Mamaia the costal line is unchanged but maby becouse of thouse... [stafilopozi]

It's "stabilopozi", and was originally a british invention, dating from around ww2.

Well, unfortunately, the coastline around Mamaia is not stationary, but rapdly deteriorating, because of some mistakes made in the late 1970s, when they decided to "clean up" the bottom of the Siutghiol lake... The lake is freshwater, has a higher water level than the sea, and the bottom is protected by a layer of waterproof silt, that allowed the lake to form there in the first place. Of course, during the clean-up operation they managed to pierce the waterproof layer in several palces, so now fresh water from the lake is seeping to the sea, slowly eroding the sandbar below Mamaia.... By the late '80s the problem had gotten so bad, that several attempts to "reshape" the resort were necessary, by bringing thousands of trucks of sand from different other places on the Black Sea coast. (I remember watching that as a small boy, while strolling around Mamaia with my father) Another stab at the problem was the building of "wavebreaking dikes" a few hundred meters in front of the beachfront, but that led to changes in the currents, some of whom now were funneled between the coast and the dikes, making the erosion process even faster! A few more ajustments later, the rate of deterioration was slowed down suficiently to allow the beach to exist without it having to be remodeled every year, but it is estimated that by 2015 Mamaia will be again in need of a "facelift'"...

Concerning the strech of coast between the tip of Mamaia and Midia Navodari: I'm not sure that is the actual shape the bank had back in 1940, but it was definitelly smaller.
Also , I ran into some new information since my last post (it's amazing what you can learn in a few hours!) that suggests the change in coastal outline is due to human intervention, not marine currents. It appeares that when they built the Canal, they ran into a disposal problem with the excavated material, so they just dumped it into the sea, extending the coastline... of course, this might also have had a structural role, because you don't want to build a waterway to close to the edge of the sea, would you? -And that would surely explain why the old coastline would still be visible in the satelite photograps- if you move dirt from one place to another, it takes time to settle, and when it finally does, it takes a lover level than the ground around it, creating a visible feature...

We might not have a final answer to this issue yet, but I plan to do some research and some on-site photographs as soon as I get to Constanta, probably in the latter part of next week.

This post has been edited by Wings_of_wrath on February 05, 2006 09:51 pm

Great informations!
About the lake, we know that durring the war there a few hydroplanes lost there, you think durring the cleanning they have been lifted or burried there somehow in the ground?

Aerial photos are a great tool, we can find out many importat features whit it.

There is indeed a local legend stating that at least three seaplanes (probably Do-18 or 24s from "8 Seenot") were deliberately sunk just in front of the hangars by the retreating germans after August 23rd 1944, but sofar no formal* search for the remains was ever undertaken. Also, I'm pretty sure they didn't find anything during the cleaning, but then again, they never properly finished the operation.

*At one time me and some friends tried to mount a search of our own, but we were promtly chased away by some irate policemen that claimed bathing is forbidden in the lake...

I see, but can you use a boat on the lake? All we need is fisherman's sonar. I think one can be rented easily.

Could it be that the "demarcation line" in the image is nothing else than the highway running from Mamaia to Năvodari?