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Dutch Scientist Proposes Circular Runways For Airport Efficiency (curbed.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: While airport terminal architecture has a solid history of style and innovation, rarely is a proposal put forth to utterly redesign the runway. But that's precisely the aim of Henk Hesselink, a Dutch scientist working with the Netherlands Aerospace Center. Dubbed the "endless runway," Hesselink's brainchild is a 360-degree landing strip measuring more than two miles in diameter. Since airplanes would be able to approach and take off from any direction around the proposed circle, they wouldn't have to fight against crosswinds. And three planes would be able to take off or land at the same time. Hesselink's team uses flight simulators and computerized calculations to test the unconventional design, and have determined that round airports would be more efficient than existing layouts. With a central terminal, the airport would only use about a third of the land of the typical airport with the same airplane capacity. And there's an added benefit to those living near airports: Flight paths could be more distributed, and thereby making plane noise more tolerable. BBC produced a video detailing Hesselink's circular runway concept. The concept is fascinating but there are many questions the video does not answer. Phil Derner Jr. from NYC Aviation writes via Business Insider about some of those unanswered questions in his article titled "Why the circular runway concept wouldn't work." The fundamental issues discussed in his report include banked runway issues, curved runway issues, navigation issues, and airspace issues. What do you think of Hesselink's concept? Do you think it is preposterous or shows promise?
I have the same concerns outlined. But I like and support someone revisiting the idea to see if it can be done better.
Maybe this proposal isn't it, but at least it's being discussed.
A computer doesn't give a shit if the runway is straight or curved, because it can handle a little more left (or whatever) while it's managing dozens of other things. But a human can't do that. You want to make pilots have to account for bank and curvature in addition to everything else? That's obviously a shit idea.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... just make it octagonal or some other n-agon.
One of the major issues seems to be what happens when a plane comes in too fast. Straight runways handle that well. It is hard to handle that with circular runways. There are a lot of other safety advantages of the standard setup.
I love how he places his drawning in the middle of nowhere with no roads or train tracks, or even neighby restraints on the layout of the land. Sure you can pull all that underground, but he seems to just ignore it.
I would have chuckled and moved on.
Would be tricky. Small planes already have to wait for larger planes for wake turbulence effects when the larger planes are taking off or landing. BTW: ever hear of "rotating the airport?" It's a pilot term.
That's all well and good, but this all falls apart the instant you try it with a real airplane.
Disclaimer: I *am* a pilot
My first thought was: how the heck are you going to keep this runway clear of snow? You've gone from a single (or dual) short strip to a (pi*2mi)= 6.28 mile loop. That's a lot of runway to plow.
Then there's the long taxi time from the outside to the terminal in the center. That's a 1 mile radius taxi. Lots of wasted time.
Then there's the poor saps living around the airport. Instead of a well-defined small number of houses with noise pollution, you've spread it all over a huge area. Lots more people to complain. I doubt people want to build houses *inside* that 2 mile loop of land, so the footprint of this beast will be impractical for an airport near anything existing at all.
And if there's a consistent level of wind (from any direction), that "3 at the some time" argument goes away, and you're back to a small strip of usable runway, at least until the wind dies down.
I think they are a few days early. Having flown private planes a bit, I REALLY have my doubts about this for a number of reasons.
Too fast, just do a turn "while landing" too fast!
No wind, which way do you land, and hope everyone else does the same.
Wind from the North, do you land going South on the left, or the right, and if you are both too fast do you head on collide each other while turning to lose speed.
Take off, and turn at the same time, I'm sure that is safe as hell with tricycle gear and questionable weight and balance.
Punta Gorda in Florida has a triangle runway. Made me think of flying in there, the off duty 2 runways become taxiways to get back to the active runway after landing. I was hoping his design was more of an octagon than a circle, but it wasn't.
Circular runways have been discussed in two posts on Quora (www.quora.com) which have yet to be merged.
Nate
We Dutchies have the best marijuana in the world. Assuming he wasn't actually sober when he came up with the idea.
Runways are often laid out with specific approach and takeoff routes, so "any direction" won't work for most airports.
And there's a scalability problem, too. A two mile circle is only at most three runways under ideal conditions. That much land area can hold a LOT of straight runways in parallel, and it can hold crossing runways, too.
In the States it'll be like when an american driver encounters a roundabout for the first time, only with bigger crashes and explosions
instead of making one circular runaway - which is difficult for the pilots to use -, make 12 runaways in the shape of a dodecagon, or 16 in the shape of a hexadecagon. You'd have the advantage of being able to take of/land from mostly any wind direction, while still having a straight runaway for the pilot to use. And you would always have two working runaways all the time.
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
When Popular Science proposed it. And let's face it. If Popular Science proposed it, it's a silly idea. Especially if it hasn't gone anywhere in the intervening 50 years.
People on Aviation.stackexchange has asked/answered this already: Could you land a large airplane on short circular runways?
"Every time you solve one problem, you create two more." * My guess is that circular runways would solve a few problems and create dozens more.
* I went looking for the source of that quote. Couldn't find it, but it appears in Popular Science, May 1942.
https://books.google.com/books...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
This must come from one of those idiots that think traffic circles (roundabouts) are the answer to all rush-hour problems.
Just scaled-up for jumbo jets.
What's next? Retro runways with 4-way stop signs where they intersect?
This is great and all during the day and in clear weather, but constantly changing approach vectors means you can't have any approach lights unless you have a ring of lights around the whole ring that extends at least an additional 1000 ft. So your "3km" footprint for the whole airport is now about 5km. Either that or all landings with less than 1 mile visibility would require autoland. You'd also need to have a system that dynamically turns the lights on/off as approach vectors change. You'd also have to completely redesign the airport charts and the approach vector would already have to be known 30-60 minutes out so that the crew can do a landing briefing which might negate the benefits of using a round runway as the winds could shift in that timeframe so you still have crosswind. You'd have to cross the runway for access to hangars, maintenance facilities, cargo warehouses, etc which most likely wouldn't fit inside the ring. Which means you are losing a quarter of your landing space pretty much constantly to allow aircraft to be towed across, cargo to be delivered to/from flights, etc.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It wouldn't cost much to model this in a simulator, and let a couple dozen pilots try it out. We'd find out pretty quick how easy or hard it really is. It would be an interesting semester project for some students at Embry-Riddle.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Rotor.
Right now, this idea sounds great in theory, but in practice it's a disaster waiting to happen - way too many things can go wrong, and the tolerance for human mistakes is a lot smaller on a non-linear non-level runway.
However, a near-future airport with fully automated traffic control which serves only fully automatic control airplanes would be a different story, and for THAT one, this runway could actually hit its peak potential.
You know, just not right now.
Let's wait for automobile autopilots wide adoption first, then move on to airplanes.
For the one benefit of your initial landing possibly being inline with the prevailing wind, you're adding dozens of safety issues, inefficiencies, and implementation issues.
Isn't there a circular airfield in Lithuania already? Pochunai or some place like that? Grass airfield for light aircraft, but the point is the same.
This idea was studied in the 1940's, and was rejected then, it's still a bad idea.
The video is pretty funny, they say you can always take off and land into the wind, but then state you can take off or land 3 planes at once at different places along the circle, but that would require one of those planes to land in a 60 degree crosswind, and the other to land in a 60 degree quartering tailwind, unless you had the planes on crossing approach paths (a really, really bad idea). A rejected landing would either put the plane right into another's approach/departure path or put wake turbulence right into short final approach of another aircraft. Wake turbulence from a heavy plane can flip a smaller plane, an A380 flipped a business jet 3 times flying 1000 feet below it last week*, the business jet landed, but the airframe is totalled. Another one also nearly flipped a 737 about the same distance away**. Ignoring it is idiotic, wake turbulence is at it's worst with heavy planes at low speeds, and drifts downwards and outwards. 3 simultaneous take offs still has the problem that if one plane takes off directly into the wind, the other 2 have to take off with a 60 degree crosswind & 30 degree tailwind unless you cross departure paths, at the other extreme it's a 30 degree crosswind into the wind, 90 degree crosswind, and a 30 degree crosswind/60 degree tailwind. You also put wake turbulence into the approach path of the next runway. You really can only use 2 runways on the circle if you account for the wind. Maybe I'm missing something, but I've made a bunch of diagrams and haven't found a solution that actually works for using 3 runways and accounting for the wind with non-crossing flight paths.
All the other potential benefits mentioned ignore the wind as a factor. It also later ups the capacity to doing the work 4 runways without explaining why. But let's ignore all the flaws in the concept itself and think about building one anyway.
11,480 foot runways would fit inside of the space of the circle, and you could build 3 at the same width for less concrete that the circle would use. But the circular runway looks a bit wider then needed, so you probably can get 4 standard runways out of the same area of concrete, probably a lot more since you don't need 50 taxiways. Even if that's not the case, 4 normal runways would use less land, and would not require building an enormous banking underneath the concrete, or the reinforced tunnels under the runways for passengers, cargo and equipment. The banking doesn't sound expensive until you realize that there's about 7 miles of it. The tunnels would need to be able to withstand a fully loaded A380 doing repeated hard touchdowns on it (remember, they can land anywhere on the circle) plus a safety factor, and be large enough for everything the airport needs. There would need to be enough land to build it near a large enough city to require an airport this size, which usually don't have large areas of inexpensive land available. And where are the cars parking?
6 runways - 3 pairs in a triangular format, with terminals and parking, uses far less land than the circular format, and is much easier to expand. The 3.5km runway idea mentioned earlier would use 5.3 km^2 or area for the triangular runways, where as a circular 3.5km diameter runway would require 9.6 km^2 of land, and in the picture much more than half of that area is for the runway and taxiways. You can fit a lot of terminals and parking in the 4.3km^2 you have left over with the triangular runways (and that does not include the area in the center of the triangle). And why would you want the terminal in the middle? It makes ingress/egress more difficult, for little to no benefit. On days with any wind (which is the vast majority of them), you'd only be using one pair of runways/2 upwind paths on the circle.
A complete, well thought out presentation of a bad idea is still a bad idea. They use the wind to justify one "benefit", but then pretend the wind doesn't exist as it is a massive problem to nearly
No wonder they marry pillows, confuse iron pots for ovens, and value tulips more than gold. They don't realize their mistake. Not that I blame them, they don't even have a Gran Prix, as they kicked out the Belgians, which granted was a good idea, since the wannabe Frogs have only done two things of value in history, and one of them was stolen by the actual French, the drunk Gallic bastards.
Anyway, the problem is that these runways will attract roving herds of Redneck NASCAR fans, who will be doubly confused since the France family (no relation to the country) has eliminated down force in the latest package, meaning all the drunk drivers EXCEPT Jimmie Johnson (who carries all eight of his Cup trophies in his car) will find themselves in the air.
I guess the only question will be why Boeing and Airbus are sponsoring so many cars.
Oh boys, where to begin.
The obvious one is to take off and land while turning, but this could be corrected with a few straight runway connected around the circle (Kinda like an "angled" sun shape). I'm actually surprised they didn't propose that instead. Of course, that also mean you'll need a lot more space.
Then there's the air traffic management, it's going to be a pain since all plane that either lift-off or land will use the "same" runway at the same time.
Furthermore, if you want a 3.5 km diameter circle, that mean that you'll need to put a lot of infrastructure "undergound". Highway, parking, car renting etc. That's a lot of digging and a lot of concrete.
Also, I have serious doubt it'll raise the traffic. a 747 need over 2 kilometer for landing and take-off. A 3.5 km diameter mean 11 km circumference. So if you're really efficient, you'll have to shut down like ¼ of the runway. In other word, you'll only be able to run 2 corridor of landing and 2 corridor for lift-off at all time at ~90 angle. And that mean you bring back the problem you have been trying to solve in the first place.
So yeah, a lot of new problems only to solve one that isn't that bad to begin with.
Elok
Landing on a runway with a curve is certainly doable, I've known pilots to land on all sorts of odd surfaces. Many of the issues about traction etc. can be trivially solved by making the circle a bit bigger.
The excitement of managing the airspace is touched upon in the Business Insider article but not really fleshed out and I believe handling it in practice would diminish many of the suggested benefits.
The standard single runway is currently managed with a basic queue (simplified version). The planes circle in large loop around the airport. The airspace controller lines them up on a fixed marker above the end of the runway and they are passed on to the control tower for the landing. Take off is the same in reverse, they lift off, fly to a fixed marker and are then handed from the tower to the airspace controller.
Running a circular runway with three approaches would be doable, you would have three fixed approach markers, the same process would be used. Issues like turbulence from adjacent planes would need to be managed but this is standard in a multi-runway airport and would actually be greatly improved compared to two parallel approaches.
Once you start rotating the approaches with the wind things start getting far more exciting. Dynamic marker points aren't going to work, too much communication required and futzing around to communicate the approach point to every plane. So you are going to have to have multiple fixed sets, keeping it simple with only 3 options, 3 approach markers, 3 departure markers you have a total of 27 waypoints in a tight area around the airport. The odds of a plane flying to the wrong waypoint is huge (multiply it out by the number of flights a day, the number of passengers in a plane etc) and the consequences catastrophic, without extensive changes to the way planes are managed the risks are just far too high.
...they wouldn't have to fight against crosswinds. And three planes would be able to take off or land at the same time...
If three are landing at the same time, I'd say that at least one is fighting cross-winds.
As if a straight landing was not hard enough, you now have to land on a turn. Wait till it snows, or gets icy.
Instead of a loop, we should make the runway a Möbius strip! That way, planes can taxi along both sides of the tarmac, allowing it to last twice as long!!
A large enough circle looks like a straight runway at any one section.
A circular runway has too many problems as others have pointed out: Weather making the runway slippery, the need for approach lights, etc. So why not stick with straight runways, but gain the advantage of a circular runways by putting the entire airport on a giant turntable? Then you can rotate the runways to always be at the optimal alignment for the wind. :)
http://archives.chicagotribune...
accomplish the same damn thing? Landing in a straight line and into the wind seems to be a good idea to me
How do you get to the terminal? Does everything go through tunnels or do cars wait at the strip like a train crossing?
VTOL?
Alex: Correct, for the win!
I could be doing my math wrong but the Nardo Ring is about 4KM in diameter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...?
The fastest a car, with suspension for cornering, can go on the highest banked part of the track is 240 km/h. A Boeing 747 takes off at 260+ km/h.
So the banking would have to be increased to prevent possible tipping but approaching a runway on a bank, or taking off, seems like it would have serious stall issues.
A non banked runway could avoid this but what kind of suspension would an aircraft need (could it be done with a tricycle?) to handle the amount the aircraft would want to roll. Plus on approach, you would have to slew with the rudder, at those speeds is there enough force from the air to keep the aircraft from sliding sideways or would you have to slew twice as much as the runway angle or more so the engines would be driving the turn?
My local gliding club is a great big grass area. They have six winch points, but can shift the launch point to suit the wind. It also makes emergency landings safer as you have a huge area to aim for. The question isn't "will it work", it's "is paving the area worth it", and I very much doubt it. Take Dallas/Fort Worth for example - it has 7 runways. The total paved area of those runways is about 147 hectares (0.6 sq miles), assuming the average width is 60m.
To fit just a single 4,085m runway in a circle the paved area would have to be 1310 hectares (5.1 sq miles) - an increase of almost 800% on the current paved area. It would be even greater as the circle would need to be bigger to have parallel 4,085m runways. Granted, I'm not including taxiways, but even so I can't see it being economic.
Physics says that there is no single bank angle that will prevent side loads at all speeds.
Even if the landing system can handle the side loads, what happens when the surface has ice?
Pilots use the idea of a stabilized approach. To land here I think I would try to fly above the runway until the crosswind situation looked good and go for it.
Probably picking a straight path across the circle like a golf ball on a contoured putting green.
That says that the approach path would differ with wind speed and direction.
How would you handle this in the airspace around the airport?
Pilots have enough trouble landing on a straight runway. An automatic system works as long as things are normal.
The pilot is around for when they are not. Where are you going to get a big enough pool of pilots that can land on one of these?
I think this proposal has two possible uses.
1) It could be a great April 1 prank.
2) It might be a way to take the now supposedly 'extra' land around some airport for some other purpose.
3) As an intelligence test.
One issue I see, at least for passenger flights, is the distance that one would need to taxi to the appropriate terminal (especially if landing from an unusual direction). The difficulties could probably be negated by using more general purpose terminals, which seems feasible with better mass transit and faster people-processing. Also, could lead to increased response times for emergency services if something did go wrong.
Also, 2 miles diameter seems rather short to be landing modern airliners on. Even smaller aircraft (e.g. B737, A320) tend to require no less than 1200m (the proper requirements are usually significantly higher) to land safely, and ground steering is not possible until the aircraft is at relatively low speed. Even if the track was banked somewhat (disregarding any aerodynamic/stability issues with this), it seems likely that a much larger radius would be needed. Increased tire wear and lateral stresses on the landing gear are also a possible concern.
Personally, I believe the even-numbered n-gon arrangements that are being suggested by people here retain enough of the purported advantages of this setup that they are what should be considered.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
He is not a pilot. And not an air traffic controller. So why does he think he has any relevant information to design an airport?
It's like writing software for a business that you are not familiar with and without any contact with a real customer. Nobody will want to use your software.
It's not circular but equally out-of-the-box. Skyscraper Airport
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
If we are going to smoke some serious weed here, I propose this idea: tunnels.
Dig a bunch of tunnels, airplanes can land onto a shorter strip and go underground. You can have as many tunnels pointing in as many directions as you want and the cool part is that all you have to worry about is ... floods and the under ground zombie people.... but it will look cool
You can't handle the truth.
The Navy tried that already in 1964. Popular Science ran an article about it: https://books.google.fr/books?...
Nobox: Only simple products.
Centripital force is
F = mv^2/r
or a = v^2/r
At a typical takeoff speed of 150 knots, the lateral acceleration needed to keep the plane centered on a round runway with a 1.5km radius is 3.97 m/s^2, or 0.40g. On a freeway you'd just tilt the roadway based on the expected transit speed (about 24 degrees for 0.40g). But with a circular runway, planes are going to be traversing every part of it at all speeds from 0 to 150 knots, so there's no single tilt which will eliminate the problem. Likewise, during the takeoff roll the required lateral force will increase with velocity. So you can't just tilt the wheel/joystick at a certain angle and hold it there while taking off. You have to constantly adjust it as your velocity increases.
If a plane has to make a no-flaps emergency landing at 200 knots (which also happened to be about the regular takeoff speed of Concorde), now you're talking a lateral force of 7.06 m/s^2, or 0.72g. Which brings us to why runways are straight in the first place. It's not because it's easier to design and build. It's because it's a stable travel path. If for whatever reason during takeoff or landing the plane's controls stop working, the plane will want to go straight. Making the runway straight means the plane naturally (and with a little luck) will stay on the runway. Making the runway round means if you lose that lateral force being applied by your control surfaces for whatever reason, the plane is guaranteed to depart the runway at speed.
What the hell, A 'heavy' aircraft cannot turn after landing or taking off, tyres will peel off, and that's in good weather.
Oh that's right, the Dutch smoke a fair bit of weed don't they.
'Hey man, it worked in flight sim'.
Add this to the 'shit' comming out of scientists in the last 10 or 20 years.
It will N E V E R happen, moron.
Just my $.02 as a private pilot...
The claim that 3 planes could be landing at once is only valid if the winds are cooperating...you don't land with a tailwind. With any serious wind, you've now limited everything to a single queue because the planes will all need to go single file into the wind.
Just another day in Paradise
1. Dig a big hole.
2. Build all the support infrastructure in the hole - parking, terminals, support vehicles, etc.
3. Cover the hole and pave a big circle over it.
4. Put the tower right in the middle of the circle.
5. Mount lasers on the tower.
6. Use the lasers to 'paint' runway markers wherever you want based on the wind conditions.
7. Have 'pop up' structures to expose runway entrances to the underground complex on an unused portion of runway.
Ta-da!
The linked Business Insider article breaks down every objection I had and confirms they're worse than I thought. I like his conclusion, too: It won't work, but it's good to see people coming up with new ideas. You never know what might come out of it.
Nope, no sig
not worth a body
How do airport runway lights work in this scheme?
https://www.thebalance.com/airport-runway-lighting-explained-282727
engrstudent
I've seen this idea before, in a Popular Mechanics (or Popular Science, one of those) magazine back in the 1960s. It didn't make any more sense then.
The last thing you want to deal with, as a pilot (I am one), is variable winds on landing or takeoff. A circular runway guarantees that the relative wind is going to change direction on take-off or landing. Not to mention playing merry hell with approach/departure paths.
Sideways loads on the landing gear leads to increased wear and risk of failure too, so unless this runway is banked (variable bank, for different speeds), that's also going to suck.
The guy is an idiot.
...logged flight time has seen these ideas crop up time, after time, after time. The radical change in pilot skills required, the creation of entire new solutions to low-visibility landing navigation signals, and the fact that it only applies to commercial airports (small airstrips take less space than the circle (unless you're willing to accept wing bank angles over 30 degrees during the most critical phase of flight) mean mostly only major destination passenger-service airports would be appropriate. Finally, every runway has two "approach plates" (pilot instructions on how to fly the approach to landing over all potential obstacles), one for each end. Pilots practice with each to ensure they know the ropes. How many "approach plates would be needed with a circular runway? Perhaps 36? And, many of those would be prohibited because they would require approaching the airport at altitudes lower than the tops of existing high-rise buildings!
This is an example of "thinking in the small." This designer is like a politician: Solve one problem by creating 30 more that "weren't anticipated."
Idea rating: DOA.
You're obviously not a pilot...and simulators are very, very sophisticated in the past 30 years. I flew the F-5 simulator once. The F-5 has the odd side-effect that when you first release the brakes, the "nose" bounces up an down slightly for a few seconds. Even THAT detail was clearly reproduced in the version I "flew."
I mean if you just straighten out the runways and make it square on 4 side, I would think that would be much safer. Or maybe even diamond shaped, who ever designed this track should go work for nascar or something, I think he would fit in well.
> A computer doesn't give a shit if the runway is straight or curved, because it can handle a little more left (or whatever) while it's managing dozens of other things.
It's not "a little more left", it's nearly a 1G turn at the proposed dimensions - about the maximum turn rate an airliner will ever do outside of test flights.
Just as important, probably, it would mean rolling the broad side of the wings into a cross wind. This is hard to explain in words, but imagine the wind is coming from the left. With a normal, straight runway, the wings are level, so the plane looks like this:
----o----
The wind doesn't hit the wings much. But if to make a sharp turn, we need to bank the wings at 45 degrees or so:
\
\
o
\
\
You can see a wind from the left (or right) will exert a MUCH stronger force on the plane, blowing it off course. Software can't magically fix that. It may or may not manage to crash softer than a human pilot would manage.
How on Earth would you do an ILS approach to this?!?
It would be a great political solution for airports that already have issues with the flight path of people living around airports. Instead of pissing of a few, you can piss of many more. Why is this a great solution?
You know it won't ever be actually done and you just leak this great plan to the opposition who then can commit political suicide by stealing your leaked plan.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
At least the Starport idea in 1993 seamed to make a lot of sense. But we still don't have this airport.
https://books.google.com/books?id=IDpkBfTEN-4C&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=starport+airport+runway+design&source=bl&ots=RrCLRIX63P&sig=Konh8NGtUCp7DG5l5ip18qhxAMY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiL1OvtxPnSAhVQ0GMKHQQvAGIQ6AEIOjAH#v=onepage&q=starport%20airport%20runway%20design&f=false
ALL runways will be runway 360 now.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Its not friendly to expansion of traffic. What if you need an extra tarmac? Do you build one more circle?
Pilot Here.
This is a bad idea.
Scientists do science (hypothesis, theory, test, publish repeat). Engineers apply science and business.
That's the old fashioned way.
The new way is:
1) Do a study with lots of measurements
2) Crunch the numbers looking for an interesting trend
3) Create a plausible explanation for the trend
4) Publish!
Managed by a tower.. that's the real problem here. I don't fly, but I've listened to a LOT of air traffic control and ground traffic control. Ground traffic is tough to manage, runway incursions are a huge risk, so how do you communicate to a pilot on *which* runway to land when there's only one, and the divisions or segments are ambiguous? How do you communicate to ground crew that they can or cannot cross the runway, and where? It seems that the ground logistics alone make this a perilous idea. If you've never heard it, search for ATC on YouTube and give it a listen, when there are crashes on the runway, there is a TON of radio traffic trying to keep people from making things worse.
I don't know how common this is in the rest of the country, but my local international airport has two runways, but both go north/south. Weather is almost always favorable for that profile, and when it's not, it doesn't matter because geographic features prevent any other landing profile. Is it really common in other parts of the US to need every possible landing direction?
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Here are some of the things I see wrong with this idea (note that the crosswind idea has real merit though):
1). Where do the pilots take off and land from? What unambiguous directions can air traffic control give to the pilots? This is critical in avoiding near misses and collisions. The advantage of current runway layouts is that they can be kept clearly In Use or Available. Pilots either have sole use of their runway space or they cannot be there. This crystal clear binary system has great value that only gets greater when the weather is poor, or at night when visibility is restricted;
2). There is a huge, vast, not very usable area in the middle of that ring. What about the inefficient use of the airport land area?
3). Where is the terminal in relation to the ring?
4). It's too late for most airports anyway. Seriously, if this was going to be a thing it would already be a thing. Most airports have a limited land base to work with and cannot really expand sufficiently to support a circular runway. That ship has sailed and this idea sailed with it;
5). Others have noted the curving runway problem, so I'll only add it for completeness and leave it there.
I wonder how Harrison Ford would do attempting to land.
This would never work for human-piloted planes. It's tricky enough trying to land on a straight runway. What you are doing is not so much landing as stopping flying at just the right second to meet the runway. Doing that on a curve is a much bigger level of complexity.
Sig for hire.
I recommend a 25,000 mile long circular runway. It could initially be constructed in sections. In fact, existing runways are already part of such a runway.
The design assumes that all air traffic revolves around a central passenger terminal.
If you look at O'Hare, some runways are for passenger traffic, and others are for cargo.
No doubt you could find some pilots that under good conditions could take off an land on a circular runway. However, the passengers would hate it due to the centrifugal forces. Or you have to bank or redesign seating to not toss people about the cabin.
This circular runway is planned so that most landings will have only headwind and negligible crosswind component from that headwind. So the issues about crosswind landings is pointless and moot for this planned circular runway.
Much negative opinion. Little evidence.
I can just see the A380 coming in to land while doing a steady left bank, then trying to apply thrust reversers and brakes while simultaneously struggling to keep the plane on the field. What could possibly go wrong?
...if an airport opens up in his area, and the Dutch gov't uses whatever kind of Eminent Domain laws they have over there to make way for this new runway.
...near "poor" neighborhoods, I can see cities using this as an underhanded means of getting rid of their "undesirables"
If you have multiple planes trying to land and any pilot can approach from any direction, only one can land at any given time unless somebody coordinates the touchdown point for each of them. Lotsa luck ensuring proper separation while trying to control how many degrees of the arc is allocated to each plane. A traditional airport will have several runways operating at any given time, so the circular runway does not seem to be much of an advantage. And then there is the side loading problem that comes from takeoff and landing on a curved runway.
One way to solve both problems is to make the entire runway revolve to match the speed of the current aircraft on final approach. As soon as the wheels touch down, the pilot hits the brakes and the runway decelarates to match. The aircraft lands in place, with very little space required. Then the plane taxis to the inner track of taxiways, while the runway accelerates to match the speed of the next approaching aircraft.
Although I think the idea of a circular runway is crazy, and the concept of a revolving runway is a monumental challenge, it might actually work.
Sounds to me like this Dutch scientist should actually be working for Fisher Price.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It needs to be said, that this is one of the better applications where automation could taxi, takeoff and land a plane. Circles tend to be the most efficient design as long as we're not talking about storage.
For example, round buildings are the most efficient for energy savings, wind resistance, and strenght. But because they're round, you lose about 10% of the space if they are on a square lot. Use those spaces for parks, or VTOL landing points.
A city fully automated would not have a grid of roads, it would have something resembling a fractal (eg circles or cloverleaf shapes) where they merge at angles to each other.
But I digress, the only way these round roads and buildings will ever come into existence is by letting the computers and robots take over the planning process, and not holding on to shitty heritage buildings. Just raze a square kilometer of a city at a time, rebuild everything, and move onto the next one, and thus you have a guaranteed process over 100 years to replace every building.
The proposed runway has a circumference of 6 miles. Meaning it turns by 60 degrees per mile.
A 747 lands at about 160 MPH and has a minimum runway length of 9,743 feet (1.85 miles). If a 747 touched down headed north into the wind, it would be headed southeast as it completed the landing, and the headwind at touchdown would become a 90 degree crosswind while the plane was travelling about 80 MPH.
Approaching the runway at 160 MPH while turning sharply, the apparent wind direction would change 90 degrees every 30 seconds.
A square, pentagonal, hexagonal, heptagonal, or octagonal runway arrangement would have most of the proposed benefits of this idea without the enormous downsides of trying to land on a curved runway.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Look more closely at the diagram.
The dual-circles around the buildings are taxiways. (Notece that, in addition to being far narrower than an airplane and too close in, they're also not circular, but have a flattened area at the right side, making it more like a "D" than an "O".
The runways are the wide, straight, "roads", of which you see just a tiny chunk at the very boundary of the picture. They're essentially tangent to the taxiways - slightly out from them.
This is just a standard airport designs with straight runways.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
From yet another Dutchman. The idea of a cicular runway has floated around for at least several years and probable at least 25.
There's also the problem that you're going to have to counter centripetal force with lift on takeoff. If the turn is 1G at normal takeoff speeds, meaning *double* the fucking wing loading, then there might not be a point where lift increases faster than centripetal force.
Would you lift off with the elevators or the rudder? "V1... V2... rotate..." (stomps left rudder pedal) "yeeehaw!" (jumps off the edge of the bank)
And unless the terminal building is two miles in diameter, there is a lot of wasted space in the centre.
Read on of the papers on their website: http://www.endlessrunway-project.eu/downloads/d1.2-the-endless-runway-background-v3.pdf
Bottom of page 28 onwards:
"In 1964 and 1965, tests were undertaken at the General Motors Desert Proving Grounds track near Mesa, Arizona, on a circular banked track, after an agreement between the NWEF (Naval Weapons Evaluation Facility) and General Motors [19]"
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I owuld not be surprised if this scientist was smoking some experimental weed to have this "fantastic" idea.
Lasers ?
Noooo
Sharks with Lasers !
Yees
aaaaaaa
During WWII there were many "circular" runways that tried to solve the wind problem
if you are ignorant of history, or a cat.
Early airports did not in fact have paved runways. The fields were often large squares or circles that enabled aviators to land in any direction they chose, and they generally chose based upon wind direction, taking off and landing into the wind which provided better airspeed/lift at lower ground speed.
As time went by even developed airfields retained the large square or larg circle layout. The airfield on North Island in San Diego, which was at one time an army airfield, then a shared army/navy field before becoming a navy field can be seen in old archival images online with the circular layout. Here is an example image:
North Island in the 1930s. The large dark rectangular runway (lower-right half of island) is the Naval Air Station runway. The large dark circle in the upper-left half of the island is the circular runway of Rockwell Field Army Base. Here is an image that shows the army/navy parts of the island back then, and here are the runways in 1933 from another view.
A little historical knowledge could kill a lot of bogus patents and sloppy PopSci/PopMechanics-style over-enthusiastic "journalism" about "new" inventions and ideas.
Obviously, airport designer has never flown a plane. Let's debunk this thing with a touch-and-go or balked landings. With a 1-mile radius and typical touchdown speeds of 140 knots (about 161 mph) for commercial aircraft, essentially this circular runway is the pattern of a standard rate turn (assuming left turns for all my illustrations here). Flying 50 feet above the runway, but tracking its centerline, the plane is in about a 25-degree bank turn. Thus, there is enough horizontal lift component to cause the turn (as coordinated by the rudder). Now bring that flight down to ground level: assuming left turns on the runway, the pilot lands the plane with the left main touching first, which quickly slows the plane down. But the plane needs to continue to track the circular pattern and maintain the horizontal lift component and, because the plane is now going slower, the bank angle must be significantly increased to compensate deceleration: the pilot adds more bank angle and clips the left wing (assuming a low wing or a mid wing), and crashes the plane.
I also point out that at touchdown, in order to track the circular pattern and because the main wheels are non-steering wheels, the turning can only come from the horizontal lift component of increased bank angle ... in other words, the right wing is flying (producing lift) but the left wing is not flying (because the left main wheels are supporting the plane) ... this condition is known as a Spin, it's very very very dangerous, and spins are never performed at low altitude (maybe at 10,000 AGL). So this circular configuration is really deadly (and that's ignoring the side loading on the higher speeds of take-off and landing).
Now let's pretend the pilot did not crash, but decides to abort the landing (e.g., seeing runway ice/water ahead). At that point, the airport designer is expecting the plane to be taking off in a spin condition (one wing flying, the other not, all to get enough horizontal lift to support the curved runway). First of all, no one purposely gets into spin configurations near the ground. And, second, the only maneuver we are trained on for getting out of a spin is Nose Down immediately (to get air over the wings so the plane is flying again), use the rudder to stop the spiral, and then to pull up from the dive. There are NO OTHER standard maneuvers in response to a spin condition for these categories of aircraft ... you don't just add more power and fly yourself out of it (as this airport designer would have pilots do) because spins are uncontrolled and unpredictable aircraft flying regime.
And every aircraft would have to be re-certificated because "Spins At Ground Level" would need to be added to the Normal and Transport category of aircraft operations.
This airport designer should take flying lessons and learn to do landings in light aircraft on runway conditions where the crosswinds are at the maximum crosswind component for his/her aircraft (the point where you're worried about crapping your pants and thinking Can I Make This?). And when that airport designer is doing crosswind landings precisely with (say) left main touching first, right main next, and nose wheel last ... well that will be the moment when he will know in his bones why circular runways make no sense. And the instructor is not going to let a student pilot experiment with adding another 25 degrees of bank to see if he/she can make the plane follow the circular track ... the flight instructor won't allow it because he/she wants to go home alive that day.
Oh, and did I mention bad weather and instrument landings? Assuming night time and fog, the airport designer is expecting the pilot to follow the track (which means looking down), while the other side of the plane is up in the air and hiding airport/obstacle/horizon visibility at night? With no visible horizontal reference for the pilot during takeoff and landing, at that point the pilot is in IMC (ins
Frank Farance
This story was released too early. It was intended for April the 1st.
The whole point of air travel is that it operates in three dimensions. Obviously what we want are spherical runways.
You guys posted this four days too early. April fool's day isn't until Saturday.
Has anyone noticed that he never even DISCUSSED the concept of TAKING OFF from a circular runway? How does one build up the necessary velocity to provide the lift?
I've got an idea!!! make it not just a circular runway but a REVOLVING one!!! Point the nose of the plane into the wind start the engines and start the runway rotating. Gradually build up speed until stalling air velocity is exceeded. Then... WHOOOOSH!!!!!!
The fact that the runway is banked also helps,of course.
First of all, you land and take off into the wind. This concept would allow for landing on only one side of the circle.
Second, this guy apparently hasn't heard of a stabilized approach. Planes need to be flying straight an level as possible to land safely.
This reminds me of a concept tractor/trailer some college baby designed several years back. The guy knew absolutely nothing about truck design and driver needs. To cut down on wind, he stuck the tractor down under the trailer. Truck sit up high for a very good reason. So that a driver can see over cars. He needs to look much further down the road than 4 wheelers because of a truck's greater stopping distance.