As an airline pilot flying Boeing 757 and 767 I think this concept is really cool but it does overlook some fundamental principles of the unreliability of weather in order to be practical.<p>This week I have landed in variable winds gusting up to 45 knots and then every inch of wingtip clerance counts, a drawback of this design.<p>What if the aircraft makes a long landing (floats) and suddely faces a different wind component that subjects it to a tailwind.<p>Also, the full circle would only be useable on zero wind days which makes me wonder about the economical reality of having a large part of the pavement be unusable most days.
> If someone one hundred years ago would have said that we would be transporting as many passengers in aircraft as we would in trains, people may have thought , "a steam engine would never fit in an aircraft made of wood and ropes".<p>That's such an eloquent way of highlighting the need for conceptualisation in engineering but also the struggle to convince others (investors perhaps) that you're not a complete nutcase when you think outside the box.
Under one of the original articles, in the comments section some military pilot pointed that lateral forces on big airliner on this runway would break the fuselage and gear of the plane.
I'm disappointed that this argument wasn't addressed in todays article.
I'm thinking if we ever figure out a way to reduce airport foot prints it could drastically drop housing costs. There are hundreds? Of acres of prime urbanish land.<p>Look at Boston for example. I wonder if they take the opportunity cost of having an airport there into the cost of flying? That land could be worth 100 billion??
For any given approach, with a circular runway there's exactly one point tangent to the runway to land. Landing short or long isn't an option.<p>Things are conventional because they tend to work well. And part of working well is being resilient to errors and non-optimal situations.
Im still suggesting my rho shape variant of this idea. You have a straight runway with enough distance to land but then have the circle for slowing down once landed.