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Heathrow replacement a floating airport?
An American architectural firm has waded into the fray over London’s future airport. Gensler, with a broad portfolio and worldwide offices, envisions replacing Heathrow with a set of floating platforms anchored in the Thames Estuary, connected to runways about 16,000 feet long. It’s not the first design of its kind, but it may get top marks for looks, released to the world this month with a colorful set of renderings that depict a setting worthy of a science fiction classic. Curved domes enclose… (www.aopa.org) More...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
The idea is great but actually building it sounds hard. Getting people out there by boat would be slow and all vehicles and equipment would have to be shipped in as well. There would have to be an underwater pipeline for fuel, and tons of other logistics problems. And a question I thought of, would the airport be on inflatted cushions floating or anchored to the seabed like an oil rig in the ocean? If it was floating, they would have to have huge electric or nuclear engines to pump air into the flotation devices. If it had legs attached to the floor, the runway would have to be extremely rigid, and they would need a humongous assembly to make legs big and strong enough to reach the floor while still holding up the airport. Now building a new airport somewhere slightly farther away from london sounds better...
"Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce to you the British cousin of Kansai airport."
well at least they built an island...these folks want a floating airport
sense they are essentially designing a giant aircraft carrier they should also install catipults and catch cables..lol
A friend of mine worked in the ATC Experimental Unit at Bournemouth (Hurn) Airport back in the 70s. They were already concerned about runway capacity back then (remember Sheppey?). For all the modelling, they found that the real limiting factor was not the runways but the airways into & out of the airports. Nowhere near the Thames estuary would work - the only solution was to use the airport ATCEU was at, Hurn, but that was (and probably still is) politically unacceptable.
well it would be nice for a water airport but that'll only come in the future