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'Pocket Airports' Would Link Neighborhoods By Air
cylonlover writes "NASA's light-aircraft partner, CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency), is running a competition to design a low-cost, quiet, short take-off personal aircraft, that requires little, if any, fossil fuel. It envisions the resulting Suburban Air Vehicles taking off and landing at small neighborhood 'pocket airports.' At last week's Future of Electric Vehicles conference, CAFE president Dr. Brien Seeley outlined just how those airports would work."
Funny thing is most general aviation airports can be accessed without even seeing a security guard.
I sometimes marvel at the size of a single road intersection: some of them are many times larger than an average person's yard!
Imagine how much land could be saved if we didn't have to dedicate so much of it to roads. I'm not sure that's what they're claiming but the thought is tantalizing.
FTA:
“The gridlock we face now is going to get worse,” Seeley stated, citing research into congestion on the world’s roads. “This is a form of insanity... We need to travel in 3D.”
Wishing more jobs offered work-at-home options! That would certainly help.
In our current political climate, there's no way Homeland Security would allow this to work in a manner any reasonable person would consider useful - it'd get "managed" and "secured" to death. You think airport delays are ridiculous - just think about the delays seen in these pocket airports because every commuter in your area needs to be scanned/groped before being allowed to start their commute.
#DeleteChrome
Well-designed light rails or metro systems lead to even higher population densities in the areas they service. This is especially noticeable in crowded cities like Moscow, Beijing etc. where the prices of apartments drop off beyond the last metro ring, dramatically as in "orders of magnitude", because without the metro, tenants cannot reach anything in these otherwise gridlocked cities, making it uninteresting for "urbanite"-minded people.
Problem is: some 10-40% of all people will try to escape urban areas of high population density if they can somehow afford it, because that's what they ultimately and strongly want. These "pioneer"-minded people (for lack of a better word) are not abandoning the city because of bad metro systems, traffic jams, but fleeing noise and their fellow humans when there's too many of them close by. A high population density means a rapid decrease in effectiveness of police, law and social norms enforcement, which is the reason people are fleeing away from it. A metro system coming to them is simply iterating the cycle of "urbanites" flowing in and "pioneers" moving out.
Once you're done pooh-poohing the idea of electric airplanes, go and use your google and wiki-fu to look up the following:
* Yuneec e430 electric LSA
* Sonex E-Flight
* Cessna Skyhawk electric 172 POC
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Perhaps the fees at under-utilised airports should be higher due to the exclusivity afforded by this arrangement? No, they're massively subsidised [see article], sometimes practically free.