51–60 of 574 posts
If you fly into Tokyo you might come in via Narita Airport (NRT) which is actually quite a distance out from tokyo. Violence is extremely uncommon in modern Japan but NRT was the site of violent resistance over several decades. Opposition forces killed several police officers, rioted on several occasions and constructed a giant 200 ft tower to interfere with test flights. Hundreds of acts of vandalism have occurred o…
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One of the interesting ideas (that was proposed even back when SEA was adding it's third runway) is to run high-speed rail to Moses Lake Airport in Central Washington and just expand there. I'm doubtful it happens, since that means building a major airport _and_ a new train.
Very interesting to see how the noise of jet engines declined significantly. While reading the article I kept thinking, it feels like investing in noise reduction would really pay off, and then a few paragraphs later, there it was. I'm also intrigued by small airports, like the one in Rio, Santos Dumont. The shortest runways in the world. If you could reduce noise and control pollution, it is very nice to have an air…
Going from 120-110 down to 100-90 isnt really a significant decline, it went from unbearably torturous to really annoying. Airports nowadays still create significant noise pollution in their surroundings.
Sound drops 4x for each 2x increase in distance from the source. So another way to put it is, if you cut sound by 10x, you are cutting the distance of severely noise polluted area around by more than 4x.
My understanding is that electric airplanes are much quieter but batteries do not have a high enough energy density to make an electric airliner with more than very short range. I wonder if it would be feasible to make some kind of hybrid that uses electric engines for takeoff and landing and regular jet engines for the rest of the flight?
When building https://randomairport.onrender.com/ I noticed that US and Euro airports always look very different Somehow US airports always seem to be surrounded by densely populated residential areas, even in the direction of the runways, while Euro airports don’t seem to have this problem. And secondly Us airports always seem to take huge plots of land compared to Euro airports. My assumption is that Us cities are…
Actually, apart from the largest US cities your average european city is larger. The US doesn't even have 10 cities which are above 1 million people.
General aviation is in decline, so really there's no need to build new airports.
Long & interesting...but a pretty good tl;dr; is: "NIMBY's are why we can't build any major infrastructure any more".
Airports can't handle the liability they incur because imposing airport noise on housing is a regulatory taking. But also, if you build an airport at such a remove from the city that no housing suffers, housing gets built out toward the airport.
Except of course, it's not a taking if you were there first. If the housing comes to the airport, there's no liability.
Also, airports don't work without being close to their city. When they tried to build Mirabel airport 35 miles from Montreal, it withered and died from being too far away.
This is transparent nonsense; 35 miles is not even a long distance. The airport you use if you live in Santa Cruz is SFO, more than 60 miles away. (There is a closer airport in San Jose, which doesn't go to convenient locations.) It takes a long time to travel between any major airport and its city. HKG is separated from Hong Kong by the ocean. A 40 minute drive to the airport is considerably better than is typical now!
If Mirabel withered and died from being 35 miles outside Montreal, that can only be because Montreal's air transport needs were already met.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, apart from the largest US cities your average european city is larger. The US doesn't even have 10 cities which are above 1 million people.
"The US doesn't even have 10 cities which are above 1 million people. reply" I did not believe this and googled it. It is true. 1 Million would be tiny in China. Province.
An airport serves a metropolitan region, composed of many cities, and there are at least 50 with 1M+ people.
Long & interesting...but a pretty good tl;dr; is: "NIMBY's are why we can't build any major infrastructure any more".
However, what I do not understand are the people who move next to an existing airport, and then complain about the noise. We used to live near a major, international airport. Planes flew overhead. That noise was implicitly factored into the price we paid, and we certainly had zero room to complain. But lots of people did anyway, soaking up lots of time and money that would have been better spent elsewhere.