Will circular runways ever take off?
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-39284294
Comment from bhj867 on 17 March 2017 at 23:37
They will in Pretany!!! Watch me. :)
Comment from ilikemaps on 17 March 2017 at 23:50
Well they seem like a good idea, and maybe they would be implemented as the money generated from the sale of now excess airport land could fund the building of the more space efficient circular runways.
Comment from bhj867 on 18 March 2017 at 00:32
My New Circular Airport A rough draft that is.
Comment from martinum4 on 18 March 2017 at 00:37
Lol, kinda idiotic IMHO… A) you can’t really expand the airport, you’d have to build another circle near it, that would probably be about 8 by 3.5 km, you’d have to basically build a whole new airport.
B) Crosswinds will be horrible on the top of the slope
C) Too costly if you want to implement an Instrumental Landing System, you basically have to build lamps and shit everywhere, you can’t just eyeball an landing.
D) You’d have to limit building height around it EVERYWHERE (in the real world when they build a near airport near me, they lowered a freaking mountain to comply to regulations), your whole city would be affected, have a look here, in the charts section “Aerodrome Obstacle Chart”, for example
E) He said 3.5 km diameter if i remember correctly, that is an used space of 9.6km², if we go to 4 (that’s just 250m left and right of the runway, not really much) because safety distance that’s about 12km², Frankfurt airport with 3+1 runways (one exclusive for starts) has about 14km² (not including the old army base), Amsterdam has 6 runways with ~18km², so that layout is really not that efficient.
F) You’d have to build heavily reinforced tunnels (planes are heavy) to get to the airport (since you can’t go there from the side)
Just my opinion…
Martin
Comment from martinum4 on 18 March 2017 at 00:40
@bhj867 place that terminal a bit further away, huuuge obstacle ;)
Comment from bhj867 on 18 March 2017 at 00:43
@Martinum Absolutely
Comment from thilo on 18 March 2017 at 13:13
Possible, maybe. Practical, not so much:
http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/03/16/circular-runways/ http://www.metafilter.com/165716/Circular-runways
Comment from Sarepava on 18 March 2017 at 13:26
So, after hearing your responses I’m going to state now that I know enough about flying to spot the massive problems with this just in order to solve a fairly minor issue. Crosswind landings LOOK scary, and yes, can cause accidents, but the number of fatalities caused by them is nothing compared to maintenance failures, pilot error or terrorism. It’s using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Comment from tule00 on 18 March 2017 at 14:45
I agree with martinum4. And honestly, what’s even good about it?
Comment from Nikolia on 18 March 2017 at 17:50
This is absolutely ridiculous. First it would be quite difficult to land, from pilots perspective, then the slope may not be good for all airplane sizes, depending on airplane weight and width. Third, this is totally not practical way of making airports, it makes it absolutely huge. I kind of think it would also be difficult to either taxi to runway or take off, it just seems odd…
Comment from bhj867 on 18 March 2017 at 21:53
It is ridiculous and impractical, but it looks cool from a mapping perspective. I had trouble mapping the damn thing, I couldn’t imagine building one in real life. The entrance building had to be almost 4 miles away with a very long tram tunnel to reach the central terminal, and there can’t be anything around it for at least a three mile radius except farmland due to height restrictions.
Comment from zhenkang on 19 March 2017 at 00:17
Possibly we do not just have a completely circular airport but have a circle runway before going inyo the airport connected to many other runways taking off?
Comment from BelpheniaProject on 19 March 2017 at 04:51
That looks kinda strange (and pretty dangerous), but this circular runway designs looks like a huge obstacle for airplanes to me.
