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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the we'll-get-around-to-it-someday dept.

When it comes to airport infrastructure, the design of terminals may have changed over the years, but the long, straight runway has stayed remarkably consistent. Dutch researcher Henk Hesselink thinks it's time for a change. His radical ideas about runway design would transform the modern airport's operations, layout, and efficiency—and even its architecture.

Since 2012, Hesselink and his team at the National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) in the Netherlands have been working on a runway design that's circular instead of straight. Their so-called Endless Runway Project—funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Program, which supported research in breakthrough technology from 2007 through 2013, and in partnership with several other European scientific agencies—proposes a circular design that would enable planes to take off in the direction most advantageous for them. Namely, the direction without any crosswinds.

https://www.fastcodesign.com/90107235/why-airport-runways-should-actually-be-circular

[Related]: giant circles from the air

Do you think such a design would work in practice?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:59PM (4 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:59PM (#486231)

    A straight runway allows you to land of take off a bit long or short, which happens a lot for many reasons.

    This one doesn't give you that margin: You've got one spot, a hundred yards maybe, and if you miss it you're in big trouble.

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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 30 2017, @04:16AM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday March 30 2017, @04:16AM (#486327)

    A) Autopilots (with adequate input data) rarely miss

    B) If you are taking a curved approach with the proper radius, your landing "spot" can grow to an infinitely long circular path.

    As mentioned elsewhere- the crowning jewel of this layout is "no crosswinds during takeoff or landing," but that misses the point that winds shift direction, sometimes frequently and unpredictably. When you've got 6 in line for takeoff on the taxiway, what do you do when the wind takes a 90 degree shift, send them for another mile of taxiing before takeoff? Even worse - when they're in the sky on landing approach, are you going to have them go 1/4 around the circle before attempting touchdown?

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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday March 30 2017, @09:18AM (1 child)

      by TheRaven (270) on Thursday March 30 2017, @09:18AM (#486402) Journal
      In the air, you turn a plane by banking it. Close to the ground, you can only turn it using the rudder (yaw). This gives you a lot less ability to make corrections when gusts of wind come in. This isn't too much of a problem for a straight runway, because you line up pretty well by the time that you're a few hundred feet off the ground and then a descending plane has a lot of inertia to help keep it on that course. Doing the same on a circular runway dramatically reduces your error correction margins.

      If your headwind increases on a normal approach, that's fine - your air speed increases, you get a bit more lift and have to cut the throttle to compensate. You'll overshoot the start of the runway, but you're still fine. With a circular runway, you'd need to yaw to hit the new point on the circle, but you've just cut the throttle, so that yaw effect is going to be reduced. Landing in strongly gusty conditions is likely to become significantly harder.

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      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 30 2017, @03:39PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday March 30 2017, @03:39PM (#486522)

        I believe if you inscribed the largest possible circle inside the Denver International Airport property, it would be so big as to be an effective straight line for most takeoff and landing operations - perhaps a fully loaded 747 might need to steer a little during takeoff, but not enough to generate even 0.05 lateral Gs.

        As I said above, this doesn't seem like a practical idea for smaller airport properties, or places with hills, mountains, cities, rivers, etc to consider.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday March 30 2017, @05:41AM

    by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday March 30 2017, @05:41AM (#486347)

    A straight runway allows you to land of take off a bit long or short, which happens a lot for many reasons.

    This one doesn't give you that margin: You've got one spot, a hundred yards maybe, and if you miss it you're in big trouble.

    And since it will be a one way circuit, if you're desperately trying to avoid a turn in that direction then landing will be an interesting experience.

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