why not put the terminal in the urban area and have a fast train/ferry/whatever to the runways
Why is it so hard to build an airport?
91–100 of 574 posts
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#92Very 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…
> Very interesting to see how the noise of jet engines declined significantly. I know people who used to live under the flightpath of Concorde arrivals/departures. Lets just say they were very happy when Concorde was retired from service. ;-)
Obligatory YouTube movie from 2007: https://youtu.be/i1ShTUVIzCI?t=41
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#93My 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?
A 3m wide fan spinning at 3000RPM for takeoff will be loud wether it's being driven by a gas turbine or an electrical motor.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#94O'Hare airport sits some 40km outside Chicago. It seems like a long way away from the city.
Narita airport is about 80km east of Tokyo.
Osaka is about 500km west of Tokyo. Osaka's airport is just 15km outside of Osaka.
To travel from downtown Osaka to downtown Tokyo would involve 95km of ground transport in addition to the flight. Or you could take the train, which would involve about 20km of transport besides the high speed rail.
You might think that nobody wants to live next to a train station, either. Or even next to a rail line. But I wonder what difference there would be in resistance to a new airport vs a major train station within 5km of a neighborhood.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#95There's this classic French movie from the 70s, "Nous irons tous au paradis", where a group of friends buy a house really cheap. They can't believe their luck until they realize the house is next to an international airport (they visited the house when the air traffic controllers were on strike). Here's the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2aFksnIghQ It's a little bit absurd of course that they didn't bother t…
I live about 5 miles from an airport. It never occurred to me when I bought the house that there'd be airplane noise, but we happen to be right in the flight path. They're infrequent enough that I didn't hear any while touring the house. The house is well-insulated, so the noise isn't bad while inside. But while outside, it's loud enough that you have to pause a conversation when a plane goes by.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Counting "city population" is nearly a pointless exercise. What matters is the metro area, otherwise you get some pretty useless results. Austin, TX is tenth by city size in the US, with just under a million people, while San Francisco is 17th, with about 800k. But Austin is a much bigger percentage of the total Austin metro area, while the Bay area is ~8-10 million people total. As such, SF feels like a much bigger…
Yeah, it is basically always is a bit pointless without context. Same with e.g. Paris. Paris itself is "tiny". But Île-de-France (the Paris region) has over 12 million people.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#97As the article points out, expanding the two airports in Chicago are out of the question. And because it is more or less impossible to build a new airport, they are planning to build a "new" airport. Which means that this tiny little thing [1][2], which handles a dozen or two Cessna flights per day, is intended to "grow" into a 4000 acre major international airport. When it grows to its full footprint, the western ed…
Airport expansion is almost as difficult as building new. In my neck of the woods, some have suggested that the (primarily general aviation) Livermore airport would make a great “reliever” airport for the Bay Area jets, but this is constantly being fought by residents, mostly people in posh Pleasanton, which is on the flight path. It’s understandable that people don’t want more jets flying above their homes, yet, East Bay travelers would benefit the most from such development.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#98There's been discussions where the "next" airport should go in the Seattle region, and the consensus is that nobody wants it. The State Legislature created a commission to try and identify some potential sites, but the public backlash was so great that they ended up submitting it's final report with no actual recommendation. One of the interesting ideas (that was proposed even back when SEA was adding it's third runw…
> One of the interesting ideas [...] is to run high-speed rail to Moses Lake Airport in Central Washington and just expand there. While reading this article, I thought about something like that too. Build an airport quite a while away from the big city, and provide a high-speed, maybe even maglev train there. Make it free for customers. Also, make it very inconvenient for passengers and staff to approach the airport…
Only allow cargo delivery via rail as well. This way this deincentivize road traffic as much as possible.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#99There's this classic French movie from the 70s, "Nous irons tous au paradis", where a group of friends buy a house really cheap. They can't believe their luck until they realize the house is next to an international airport (they visited the house when the air traffic controllers were on strike). Here's the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2aFksnIghQ It's a little bit absurd of course that they didn't bother t…
I live about 5 miles from an airport. It never occurred to me when I bought the house that there'd be airplane noise, but we happen to be right in the flight path. They're infrequent enough that I didn't hear any while touring the house. The house is well-insulated, so the noise isn't bad while inside. But while outside, it's loud enough that you have to pause a conversation when a plane goes by.
How did it not occur to you that there would be noise from airplanes if you live that close?
Or is it more of an airstrip where only ultra light aircraft depart?
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of it is our definition of cities versus metro areas. Boston's population is technically only 650k but Boston proper doesn't even include Cambridge which is like not including one of the boroughs when talking about NYC's population. Granted, we still have a lot less metro areas with over 1 million people but there are still ~50 of them.
Is this something fairly unique to the US or do other countries do this too? that is, having a city boundary that's relatively small compared to the metro area.
I don't know if it's common to other countries, but a big factor in the US is race and class. There was a ton of "white flight" in the US starting in the 60s with white middle class and above fleeing cities to the suburbs. As such, they specifically did not want their adjacent town to be annexed by the major city.
In plays out pretty comically in Austin TX in my opinion. You have these teeny affluent enclaves (search for "Sunset Valley", "Rollingwood" and "Westlake Hills" near/inside Austin) that anyone else would consider "part of Austin", but they don't vote in city elections or pay city taxes (but they certainly take advantage of all the benefits of being close to Austin...)