I've heard of using the headlights of ambulances and police cars to light up a landing area for helicopters during medical evacuations but how many vehicles would you need to light an entire runway? Well, according to the BBC, around 300 should do it.
On 2 April 2013 residents of Contamana, a remote town in eastern Peru, used the lights of around 300 motorcycles and motorcycle taxis to light up the local airfield runway so an emergency medical flight could take off.
Doctors had decided to evacuate a 31-year-old woman and her new born daughter, along with a 17-year-old boy with a possible case of leptospirosis, to a hospital in Pucallpa. By the time the flight was organised, darkness had fallen and the pilot couldn't take off as the airstrip at Contamana doesn't have any runway lights.
A local radio station put out an appeal asking motorcycle taxi drivers to go to the airstrip and light the runway so the plane could take off. Peruvian news outlet El Comercio reported that the flight landed in Pucallpa without incident.
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