Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com notes a proposal for a circular runway:
Airports take up a lot of room that could be used for other productive purposes, and often their runways do not align with the wind direction, making landings difficult. But Designboom shows us what might be the answer to the problem: make the runways into a big circle. Designboom notes that ” that making runways ring-shaped can have a positive environmental impact. since planes will not have to compete with strong cross winds, they will burn less fuel in the area around the airfield. ” They are also much smaller.
The idea, from Henk Hesselink of the Netherlands Aerospace Centre, is in the news thanks to a recent BBC video.
A link to the video is on Treehugger.
Lloyd is not entirely happy with the Internet, though, because a bunch of pilots forgot to read up on the proposal before taking a poo on it:
But this episode is particularly strange; people are writing long dissertations about why it cannot work, without a single reference back to the original research, with one expert at NYC Aviation actually starting a long essay by saying “I must concede that they may have answers and solutions to my below issues that were not provided in the short BBC report” and then goes on for pages.
If there is one thing I have learned as a blogger, the first rule is that you click through to the source, even if your finger gets tired.
Which reminds me of one of the three laws of Arthur C. Clarke:
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong. [BrainyQuote]
If the calculations check out, then someone is just going to have to try it and see.
