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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: 2) by vux984 on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:56PM (1 child)
"A polygon is a plane figure that is bounded by a finite chain of straight line segments closing in a loop to form a closed polygonal chain or circuit."
True, but that's not what you meant in your original post.
This is what you wrote:
"but you don't want a circle, you want a polygon. How many sides depends on how much space and how long the runways are, but if you put several straight runways long enough into something *approximating* a circle you could effectively do what they are claiming "
Contextually, its pretty clear that you were talking about a 'regular polygon' (per the mathematical definition of 'regular polygon'). I mean, if by 'polygon' you were allowing for an non-regular self-intersecting mess of landing strips... that would include all kinds of stuff you weren't talking about, including most airports today (at least if you include the taxi lanes as part of the polygon).
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday March 30 2017, @07:19PM
That's actually kind of what I was thinking of too - that to the degree this is a good thing I suspect airports already do it. I don't know much about airports, I'm just guessing, but wouldn't it make sense to line up your strips oriented favorably in relation to the prevailing winds? When you have several wouldn't it make sense to try to plan it so that if the wind shifts against the first one the second will be at a better angle and so on?
So I suspect that if this matters enough to worry about, prevailing practice is probably already doing it better, using non-regular polygons optimized for the local weather conditions rather than some ideal circle that would make both take-off and landing unnecessarily difficult if not just flat impossible, or else be simply enormous I suppose (if the circle is big enough you can start slicing arbitrary straight strips inside it.)
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