markers for grass strips

[turbo]

this past week we spent time at a friends grass strip in Tennessee, TN65, which was marked with these white cones. he has added solar powered lights on top of the cones that come on at night. to say these are easy to see is an understatement. i believe he got them at Oshkosh. i have never seen them before but thought they were a great product.

[humptybump]

7B3 has had lighted yellow cones. They were very visible.

53VG uses either corn or soy beans to mark the boundaries of the runway.

[Bill Boyd]

We use tall hay to mark the lateral boundaries, and woodchuck holes at random places along the runway to mark the... well, to mark the holes you shouldn't taxi into, of course

-Stormy 12VA

[DanH]

A surprising number of airstrip owners don't mark thresholds, and mow the overrun areas, the result being that you can't quite tell where you should (or should not) plant the wheels. It's good to see some threshold cones in the above photo.

[JoeLofton]

I fly off a grass privately-owned, public use strip in north AL that is marked with painted tires. ALDOT inspected the runway and gave us a list of deficiencies and required threshold and runway marker distances to account for terrain and obstacles (the runway edge markers has to be in a straight line instead of meandering!). We tidied everything up, installed the threshold markers, and passed the follow up inspection. Lost considerable runway width because of trees along the sides; we're now down to only 90 feet width.

[Ron B.]

I prefer hyw. cones compared to painted tires as the cone would do less damage if one had to over run the strip and struck one (or more).

[M McGraw]

I use white 5 gallon plastic buckets. I have 8 inch tall black stickon numbers. The buckets are two hundred feet apart. If you see 14 on a bucket it means 1400 feet remaining. To the point of DanH about runway end markers I agree. I have four buckets per side at the threashold to make it stand out. Under each bucket is a white painted concrete pad incase I move the buckets for repainting or mowing. If someone hits a bucket, which they have, it just bounces off the plane into my hayfield. Never had damage to a plane and they seldom blow around in the wind. Best part, the buckets were free. I considered solar powered lights, in fact I have them in storage in my hangar, I decided against encouraging night flight into my strip. We have mountains close by.

[humptybump]

Originally Posted by DanH

A surprising number of airstrip owners don't mark thresholds, and mow the overrun areas ...

I've seen alert strips painted on boards at one grass strip to indicate the official start of the runway.

At 53VG, the "threshold" is the road and the trees. It's too short to have anything resembling an overrun. I've considered orange traffic cones along the sides but I know half of them would "disappear".