SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @12:26AM (1 child)
This story would have been funnier on March 14th.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday March 30 2017, @02:41AM
It should have been posted tomorrow.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek