Qualla: Quang Lang Air Base

Quang Lang Air Base: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

About two hundred bombs. More than 160 craters counted in the reconnaissance photographs afterwards. Fourteen breaks in the runway — and those quickly repaired. That is the whole arithmetic of the December 1971 attack on Quang Lang, a modest dirt-and-steel airfield 75 kilometres northwest of Vinh, and it is the reason people who study air power keep coming back to places like this. Cratering a runway is easy. Keeping it cratered is the hard part, and in the hills of western Nghệ An the North Vietnamese were very good at the hard part.

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Quang Lang Air Base: Five Days After Christmas

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The raid was part of Operation Proud Deep Alpha, flown between 26 and 30 December 1971. More than two hundred US Air Force and Navy aircraft put up 1,025 sorties against targets in North Vietnam south of the 20th parallel, some as close as 120 kilometres to Hanoi, with the airfie...

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Quang Lang Air Base: Steel Mats and Shovels

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Quang Lang was built in 1966 and sat at just 60 feet above sea level, its runway surfaced with pierced steel planking — the perforated, interlocking steel mat that armies have used since the Second World War to turn a graded field into an airstrip in days. Its great virtue is mod...

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Quang Lang Air Base: Two Mornings Overhead

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The air above the base was busier than the base itself. On 19 January 1972, escorting an RA-5C Vigilante on a photo-reconnaissance run over Quang Lang, Lieutenant Duke Cunningham and Lieutenant j.g. William P. Driscoll of VF-96 — flying an F-4B from the carrier Constellation — en...

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Quang Lang Air Base: Back to Rice

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The field was hit again on 15 June 1972, during the sustained strikes of Operation Linebacker, and hit once more three days later, on the 18th, with further damage to the runway. It was the end of its useful life: Quang Lang had been in service six years, from 1966 to 1972, and i...

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