St. Helena Airport

Bits of the British Empire

A news report about commercial flights from Johannesburg starting this month contained some semi-hysterical statements (which is normal for The Telegraph) that prompted me to do a little checking. First order of business is to plot key locations on a map (above). Gold stars indicate:

• RAF airbase Brize Norton in the UK is at the top. 
• Johannesburg is at 4 o'clock. 
• Windhoek, Namibia is just to the left of Johannesburg.
• Port Stanley is in the Falkland Islands.

The Falkland Islands are a heck of a long way from the UK. Having a friendly airport at St. Helena would make a military response to Argentine aggression in the Falklands a little easier. If you are going to have an empire, you need to be prepared to defend it, even if parts of it are tiny and half a world away.

St. Helena Airport

St. Helena got its airport in 2015. Building the airport required dumping half a million truckloads of fill in a gulch so they could have big enough piece of flat land to build the runway.

St. Helena basics:

It is one of the most remote islands in the world, and was uninhabited when discovered by the Portuguese in 1502. It was an important stopover for ships sailing to Europe from Asia and South Africa for centuries. Napoleon was imprisoned there in exile by the British, as were Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo (for leading a Zulu army against British rule) and more than 5,000 Boers taken prisoner during the Second Boer War, including Piet Cronjé. - Wikipedia