Are Futuristic Floating Airports Already Beached?

nineteen thirties. Yeah, this was something so I read an article in CNN that prompted me to look into this, and it all started with an article that came out in Popular Mechanics in January nineteen thirty. Now was that Popular Science or Popular Popular Mechanics. You can actually read the entire issue of January ninety Popular Mechanics on Google Books, and the whole thing is physically scanned in. There's a whole bunch of of those old back issues of that,

and it's really fascinating for the advertisements and for the articles. Well, for one thing, you know that this was this was a small piece about the future of commercial flight. Because commercial flight was pretty young in n there hadn't been a whole lot of it yeah, the right, brothers, that was only like what three or yeah? And so there were bits of in the articles such as will you plummet from the sky? Uh? Will you, to which the answer was maybe, to be fair, I wonder that every

time I get on an airplane. Yeah, I understand the physics, and I'm still like, right, right the whole scenes, in defiance of the laws of nature, we will take flight. Well, this this article had a tiny paragraph in it that was says aside for a specific uh subject, and that was this idea of airport built over the surface of the ocean, specifically, several airport built every four hundred miles or so across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and North America.

And the idea was not that planes had to land in order to refuel, although that would definitely be a bonus because they could because they had already done long long distance flights before, but more for the comfort of passengers. Uh. The amenities aboard early commercial flights were let's say, even less impressive than flying coach today. Anyway, unless you were rich, in which case you might have all the comforts the wealthy could afford. Yes, you would, you would, you weren't

so worried about speed, We're worried about luxury. But they wanted to put an airport about every four dred miles across the Atlantic. And it didn't go into a lot of detail about the actual mechanics of such a thing. It did essentially say that these airports wouldn't truly be

floating on the ocean. They would be so ported by columns that reached all the way down to the sea floor, and in fact the airport itself would remain eighty feet suspended over the surface of the water, so would appear to float over the ocean, but it wouldn't truly be floating. But that's what we're gonna talk about today, are floating airports. Uh these, by the way, the ones that we're talking about, popular mechanics never happened. Uh, just no one wanted to

put down the money. I guess according to popular mechanics, each floating airport would cost about twelve million dollars. So twelve million dollars about a hundred and seventy million dollars in today's money, which is actually a low estimate compared to some of the other plans that actual humans have actually cooked up. Right, right, well, it could very well be that Popular Mechanics was being overly optimistic about the

construction costs of such an airport. So uh, it's it's just one of a few early suggestions of this kind of approach. There was actually another one that came along just a couple of years later. Yeah, in February nineteen thirty four issue of Popular Science that came across an article called Uncle Sam asked to build floating ocean airports. And it must be terrible when you're an icon and you're not even a real person and people come to you and like, hey, can you build a floating ocean

airport for Build it? Build it for me. Yeah. I just asked Mr Peanut the other day if they would, you know, co sign on a homeland and that was probably unfair on me. Well, this was about a this Canadian inventor and engineer named Edward Robert Armstrong's long running idea for these things called seed romes, and these were

truly as proposed floating airports. So a seed rome would be a one thousand, two hundred and twenty five foot long landing area and refueling station floating a hundred feet above the water on a series of twenty eight buoyancy tanks that are partially submerged and also had ballasts there to help, you know, prevent it from rocking too much in the waves and stuff like that. And these things would have overnight accommodations and they'd essentially be run like

a ship. Also like a ship, the seed drome would have propellers for self guided navigation if necessary. They're under most circumstances. They would remain anchored in place by steel cables which are attached to a buoy which is in turn attached to a heavy sunken anchor. And if you all want to see what a picture of it looks like, I've got a little link here you can take a look at it. It looks like those great old retrofuturist

illustrations of the you know, the future. It has great girders and beams and and all of that sort of industrial magic. That's wonderful. But so what it called for was sort of like you were talking about a series of stations throughout the Atlantic Ocean. It called for five

seed dromes between the United States and Spain. It's at about at the latitude of Washington, d C. That would work as refueling stations for transatlantic flights, and the the sea drums would each be about three hours flight apart from each other. And one of the rational is given

in the article. I don't know if there's really all that much to this, but what the article claimed was that planes could transport heavy payloads with greater speed since the refueling stations would require the planes to carry less fuel in addition to their payloads, so you wouldn't have to put all the fuel on board that it takes sticking across the ocean. You could just sort of, you know,

fill up one fifth of the tank each time. But according to this article, the US government was quote interested in the proposal, and Armstrong was currently seeking federal funding for the project, and somehow it just didn't work out. I don't know. I'm guessing they should have asked someone besides just uncle Sam, right if I found at least Santa and the Easter Bunny to right it. Arguing arguing with a poster just doesn't trust me, I've been there,

doesn't really get you anywhere. Oh. I imagine that there were several other things going on in this country other than like a pressing need to get more stops between US and certain parts of Europe. Well, Sam had this bizarre plan to build landing strips out of people. He was a saying, I want you to land planes on, and just a few years later there'll be plenty of unemployed to use them as ballast. Uh yeah, moving on

from gallows humor. So these projects didn't work out, but it didn't stop people from thinking about the floating airport concept in general, and in fact it has There's gonna be so many puns in this, and I apologize resurfaced many decades later, and uh you might wanna know, like, well, why would anyone be interested in a floating airport in the first place, Like what's why not build a regular airport? Yeah,

what's the appeal? Well, I mean, part of this is to think about what is the purpose of an airport. Obviously it's to land planes. But you can't land a plane just anywhere you're want to land it closer to the destinations where people want to go. So, uh so land scarcity and local land scarcity matters. And it's not that there's not enough land on Earth to land airplanes on. That in many cases there's not enough flat stable real estate near the big population center where people are trying

to get to write. Yeah. No one is saying that New York State does not have enough land in it, but the isle of Manhattan specifically not large. It's pretty it's pretty jampacked with stuff already. Yeah. Yeah, there's There are a lot of places around the world where the populations are either coming close to reaching the capacity that

their airport can provide or are beyond that capacity. And it's not as simple as saying, well, why don't you just build another runway, because sometimes there's just not any space to do that. You can't really add on to some existing airports. And then the other, the other alternative, is to build an additional airport. There may not be any flat land near the city that's available for that.

I mean, think about Japan. That's a great example. Japan has extremely densely populated cities, and it also there's not a lot of flat land. Sure, yeah, and well and and furthermore, when you start talking about building a second airport, then you're getting into that problem that we've discussed before on this show about adding um uh more infrastructure problems. Rather than kind of doubling up with the infrastructure that

you've already built. Yeah. Well, and actually in there's some cases where there's been discussion of creating a floating airport to completely replace an existing airport, so it's not even to just supplement what is already there. And maybe that we could raise that parking lot and put up some more high rise condos. Yeah. Yeah, boy, market has really opened our eyes to the future, hasn't it? Okay anyway,

So land scarcity is obviously a big issue. That's probably a reason number one why people have looked at floating airports. The idea that if you can't really find flat ground that is not already taken up by something else, what about any water that's nearby. You don't have to worry about flat ground there you can if you can build something on water and make sure it's steady enough, then that could solve a lot of issues depending on where

the city is. Obviously you kind of had to be near water, but a lot of our major population areas happened to be because well, I don't know if you notice, but water is something that we need. Also, trade routes having been what they were for a long time. Yes, seaports were kind of a thing. Our city of Atlanta is kind of an exception because we were sort of a a stop for a lot of different land routes along the Eastern Seaboard rails. Yeah, yeah, I mean Atlanta

used to be terminus. It was the place where all these rail lines terminated. And uh so it's a little different. But but most cities tend to be not too far from a coastal region and that's where you could put something like a floating airport. Honestly, be a lot harder to do it in the mountains. So that's reason number one. Another reason, though, is the idea of cutting back on noise pollution. And it's not that an airport over the water would magically be more quiet. It's that there aren't

as many people living on open water. So air airplanes coming down and landing at an airport that's on open water, you wouldn't have as much noise pollution there because it wouldn't be affecting anybody. I mean, the noise would be there, it just wouldn't be affecting people right right, And and

that's more than just an annoyance. If you live in an area with heavy continual noise pollution, like an airport that puts adults at possible risk for hypertension and thus cardigio vascular disease, and kids in that situation could be at risk for stuff like impaired reading, comprehension and long term memory plus higher blood pressure. Again. Um, so getting that kind of industry out of our neighborhoods could do

real good for people. Yeah. So there's there's some actual like positives that you can point at right way and say, all right, all right, I can see why you would consider this, But there's there's some also potential negative impacts as well. Doesn't sound cheap, super not cheap, I'm guessing un cheap, But there's an opposite cheap there is, it's expensive,

and that's what this would be. Yes, But aside from the monetary thing, there's also environmental concerns because you know, it is taking a source of noise, pollution and heat sink due to all that pavement and you know local land environment destruction and putting all that bad stuff smack into the middle of an ocean. Uh? Is that good? Times?

Is that worth it? Yeah? And when we get into talking about specifics, I'll mention some of the the uh, the stuff that various groups have said like, oh, the invinmal impact would be minimal. Um, I'm somewhat skeptical of that, at least in a few cases. I'm I'm pretty highly skeptical. I think that in general, when you're covering a few square miles of ocean space with something that didn't used to be there before, there's probably going to be an

environmental impact, some kind of impact. And oceans, as we have said before, are tricky. There's more ocean than truck. So negative negative, Um, no, absolutely, you're absolutely right. Hey, but wait a minute, I've got a question. Sure, Okay, don't we already have floating airports because I've seen pictures

of aircraft carriers. It looks kind of like that's sort of what they are, so kind of if you fly a fighter jet, and I do want I was about to say it was learning so much more about Lauren today. So yeah. It wasn't long after the invention of heavier than air aircraft that people started saying, huh, I wonder if you could put it on a boat. Brave pilots some might say crazy, began to experiment with trying landing

on and taking off from oats. In fact, that the earliest aircraft carriers were converted merchant vessels, where they built a flat deck on top of the existing boat's deck and then asked people to kind of try and take off from it or land on it. The earliest attempts, by the way, not a successful but this developed over time and you began to see actual ships dedicated from the design process all the way through construction to be an aircraft carrier. And so before World War Two we

had dedicated aircraft carriers sailing around the ocean. In fact, I think the British had the earliest ones. Now they tend to be relatively small compared to a commercial airport runway. The runways on aircraft carriers maybe might be about three feet long, and they often use catapult systems. In fact, they all have some form of catapult system to propel a jet forward so that it gets the speed necessary

to take off. So to catch them kind of, they've got a cabling system where that when the jet is landing, a hook catches a cable and that helps the jet come to a stop instead of just rolling right off the other end of the aircraft carrier and into the ocean. So that's a very short runway three feet is incredibly short. A medium sized commercial aircraft requires a runway of six

thousand feet. It was a way bigger times twenty times longer, and larger jets need even longer runways like eight thousand feet. So what are you gonna do? The obvious solution here is to have passengers flying Harrier jets. Yeah, that that sounds great. It might be a little expensive, and you might be you might be tying your luggage to the outside of the jet, but it would definitely be an exciting trip. Biscoff cookies and I don't know that you'd

be holding onto your cookies and a Harrier jet honestly. Uh. Although I've always wanted to fly in a like, I have an experience of being able to fly in one of those, either a stunt plane or a fighter jet type of thing that's anyone out their college. Yeah, I'm still waiting on my hook up for a helicopter. But you mean a shorter, vertical takeoff jet or just any fighters Really, any fighter jet vertical takeoff and landing jet would be super cool. But really, any jet is what

I'm talking about. But no, that's not really a practical solution. Obviously, So if we wanted to build a floating airport, it would have to be of a significant length in order to meet the requirements of commercial aircraft. Um and then also with the aircraft carriers, the traditional kind, they have

some problems with pitch and roll. I mean, obviously if it's if the if the swells are really really big and the aircraft carrier is in fact moving, it makes it much more difficult to have a safe landing on that that surface, and that might be a level of risk that could be acceptable in some military applications, but

it wouldn't be acceptable in a commercial flight. So you have to have a surface that is going to be as steady as you can possibly make it, and that means you have to come up with an alternative to your classic aircraft carrier. But people have done this, like we were saying before, like this is a thing that people have gotten through a number of planning stages for. Yeah, yeah, we've even had a model made of this and had

aircraft land and take off from such a model. That model would be one that was constructed in the mid ninety nineties. That's when a group of companies, mostly shipbuilders, got together in Tokyo to discuss the possibility of constructing what we now call very large floating structures or vl F s is I love I love it when the word large is in any kind of acronym. I like it with the word very Consider their very large floating structures,

thank you very much. Uh. And it was specifically for the purposes of an offshore airport, although they proposed other uses for such a structure as well, and they wanted it to float in Tokyo Bay, and so they formed what they called the Technological Research Association of Mega Float. Mega Float. It's not a transformer, sadly, uh they Yeah. Well, I mean I guess it transformed from lots of smaller segments into a very big segment. Yeah, because they built

it out in sections exactly tiles almost. Yeah. I think of I think of like like like old hot wheels tracks where they snapped together. It's kind of the same sort of idea. So so each segment was pretty huge, as by sixty uh. And the overall length of the full airport. If they were to build the big thing, it would have been five thousand meters long, and four thousand meters would be runways. Five thousand meters long for for our non meter readers is about three point one miles.

That's a big floating structure. Yeah, yeah, And so the actual individual segments, I just had a question. I never thought of this before. I don't know what the answer is. Well, what is the largest floating structure ever created by humans? That's an excellent question. And I don't know the answer either, because I didn't think about it before we did this, but I would imagine it couldn't be much larger than

that for a floating structure. Most of the floating structures I know about that are big or things like oil rigs, and they're they're large, but they're not three point one miles in size large, at least not the ones I'm aware of. Um. In this case, the actual individual tiles themselves were big. Three hundred meters by sixty Now that means that's more than three d yards, which means that these individual tiles were longer than three football fields laid down,

you know, end to end. And they each of these segments were built on on tanks that you know, sealed tanks that allowed it to float. That's what created the buoyancy. And so you had these floating segments that then were towed into Tokyo Bay snapped together. Uh, they had a series of clamps Joe, and then welded together. They actually talked about how they had to you know, there might be water in some chambers that would have to be

pumped out. They'd then be welld and sealed together, welded and sealed together, and then ultimately you got this one thousand meter long runway that was kind of the scale model for the overall airport. Um they hypothesized that due to the size of the structure, it would be so large that would span multiple wave cycles. So you know, ocean waves are physical waves, but they behave the same

as other types of waves. And in fact, the idea was that the structure would be so large, then the waves that would encounter the mega float would cancel each other out so that you would you would not get a net movement with the actual airport. You would only get a tiny, little little deflection, like a little deflective

movement due to the waves. And it was referred to as the hydro elastic response or just elastic response, although in the report they said it was quote hardly noticeable in quote but to be fair they said, even though it was a minute amount of movement, they wanted to do extensive testing to make sure that this was not gonna end up causing any you know, issues, any safety concerns for aircraft. Obviously, that would be a flaw so great to cause them to completely abandon the project entirely.

So they determined, this probably isn't gonna be a problem. We will test it to be absolutely sure. And they began to test this and said that everything seemed to go pretty well. Um, however, uh, they it's not there anymore. What happened, Well, they tested it and then the experiment was over. Then they dismantled it. I mean again, it was only meant to be a model, like a thousand meter long model. Um. They were able to show that

there were some interesting safety features here. Uh. They showed that the overall structure could remain bulliant even if one section suffered damage. They said, if there were a catastrophic crash, and of course you hope that never happens, but if there were, then depending upon the level of damage, the structure should still remain fine. For one thing, if there was a fiery accident, most of that heat would dissipate into the air, it wouldn't transfer into the structure itself.

The structure is made out of steel, which is pretty resilient stuff. Uh. The if it crat the top of the tanks, it should still remain fine. Uh. And if it even caused cracks all the way through the tanks to the bottom, it still would remain bulliant, assuming that it's damaged just one section, because the other sections would keep it floating, and so then you could send in repair crews to repair whatever the damage was and keep

the whole structure safe as a result. Um. They also talked about how with it being segmented, if you're talking about like a massive damage where you need to replace a segment, it's more or less modular, so you could in theory do that. It would still you know, the airport would have to go offline for a significant amount of time, but you could remove a segment and replace

it with a new one if that was absolutely necessary. Now, with a structure like this, I would be kind of worried about what might happen in the case of extreme whether events or like a tsunami exactly, or a heavy

storm or an earthquake. Right, So, it's supposed to be earthquake proof unlike a normal airport, so not only earthquake proof, but to the point where you could potentially continue to operate the airport in an earthquake situation, so you'd be able to have people landing and not just circling the city until you know, an assessment can be made as to whether or not the airport is safe to land on.

Uh So that's interesting, and they even said that it could be tsunami proof because it'd be far enough out in the bay where the swell of water would not be so great. They talked about how the swell of water gets the tallest as it approaches land, and that it would be far enough out where it would be able to weather that without it having a significant impact

on the movement of the airport itself. It would only be after it passed through where the airport had been moored off the coast of uh Tokyo that a tsunami wave would be large enough to to start affecting people, and by then it had already passed where the airport was. But that is important to note that it is it is a structure that would be moored, it would be tied to essentially an anchor point or several anchor points that it couldn't float away. Right, You don't just talk like,

so have you been to the airport lately? I would have gone yesterday, but I don't know where it is now. Last I saw it was sailing towards China, Like that would be awkward. Um, so, yeah, they has a mooring point where it would be anchored to the mainland um or at least the rest of Japan in this case. So it was really interesting. Again, I don't know how much credence to give the report. It wasn't like this was an investigation by a third party that said, hey,

we looked into this, we looked at their experiment. It all seems to be on the up and up. This was a report filed by the very entity that had an interest in having And now, granted, I would imagine any entity that does have an interest in building this would want to be as transparent as possible because if something were to go wrong, that's a huge amount of accountability. Right, Like, you wouldn't want to say, ah, yeah, this airport, it's gonna work fine for you. I gotta leave town, but

this airport is gonna be great for you guys. Hopefully it wouldn't be like, yeah, we checked all the safety bring all your orphans and kittens, right, We're gonna be just like you know, fruit stands and big panes of glass and nuns, everything that you know you don't want to be involved in, like your your basic car chase. Yeah, why are you chase? Because I was just sitting there and think, like all the things that automatically mean that you are going to see something really dangerous happen. You

can just put that out there. Actually, to be fair, they even said that an alternate use for these structures well an emergency gathering place. The idea that if there were, say a massive earthquake, you could you could evacuate people, or you know, there's a tsunami on the way, you could evacuate people to one of these very large floating structures where they would be out of harm's way for

the duration of that event. Now, it may very well mean that there's still lots of work to be done afterward, because the city itself could be you know, very much affected by it, but the people, the human lives could be saved, and you could make this an emergency response kind of situation, even to the point where if you had constructed these pieces but had not yet deployed them, you could send them to a place where you know there's going to be a problem and it could serve

as like almost like an emergency raft for hundreds or thousands of people. Just kind of cool, really. And they also had a segment about the environmental impact, and here's where some more skepticism comes in. They said the environmental

impact would be minimal. Really. The biggest thing it would impact would be fight o plankton, which would just move all away to a different area around the megastructure, and then the zoo plankton would follow the phytoplankton, and fish would follow the zoo plank Yeah, everything be cool, and it's just floating. It's not like there's anything disturbing the seabed. So really just except for the mooring. Yeah, well but

the mooring. The mooring points exist anyway, It's just that the structure would be moored to an existing mooring point because you're talking about a big bay. But I mean, you would literally be casting shade on the sea floor. You know that, you guys are just silently judging me. I was waiting for Jo to react. Sometimes's reactions are really beautiful. Uh no, No, I'm I'm so I'm so

dubious about this thing, about that environmental impact part. But it's you know, I'm sure it's it's really just like like the potential for for chemical runoffs. Sure, yeah, you have jet fuel, you have exhaust from the planes. Yeah, you've got oil that's going into places. That oil goes into all kinds of stuff on a flat surface that's on the ocean, right, So then heavy rain hits that there's going to be runoff, and they have some kind

of collective technology. It needs a lip. It's like it needs to be like a rimmed baking pants, like like a serious set of gutters. Yeah exactly. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it's very possible that it incorporated something along those lines in order to do that. But I didn't come across that in any of my research. I'd just be concerned and I'm like harping on this now, I feel like, but but I'd be so concerned about all of that pavement that you use. Pavement absorbs heat, that heat goes somewhere,

is it distributed down into the water. Are we warming oceans further? Well? I did read something about what one of these one of these floating I can't remember which one, Maybe Jonathan you'll recall that said like, look, you know, even if there's a fire, this thing will be fine. Line. It's it's just that was megafloat said. They said that fire would be completely contained locally and the structure would

be fine. Are the fish chill about it? I think they said it was According to them, again, it would just radiate upward direct That's what they're saying was heat would dissipate in the air. But I mean, honestly, without without seeing a third party investigation on this and seeing what the environmental impact is, I I like you, Lauren, I I feel that there's probably a larger impact than

we are led to believe in the report. I I suppose that there could be some kind of thermal insulators to prevent any heat that happens on the top of the surface from bleeding down through the bottom. And it's also possible that Tokyo Bay may already be an environment that is not the most conducive to life. But that doesn't mean we should make it worse. Come on, let's go for blink you the four eyed fish. But at any rate, so that that was an experiment and by

two thousand they had dismantled it. They continued to analyze the data, but it the mega float no longer exists. It is not in Tokyo Bay anymore. But there was talk of a sequel, the revenge Megafloat returns or Electric Boogaloo. Well it's called it was going to be called Megafloat too, but so far it hasn't come together because it's modular. Yeah, hasn't happened yet, but there was talk of doing it, so it may still happen at some point, but it hasn't.

Um it hasn't happened since two thousands. So and yet there's still this need to increase that that capacity for air travels. So it could be that it's revisited in the future. Yeah, but could we consider that talk scuttled? Yeah, that the that idea has has just sunk. Yeah, okay, guys, that do we do we have any other proposals to talk about? Plenty? Yeah, the couple in San Diego, San Diego desperately needs another airport. Yeah, so San Diego, you've

got a city, big city southern California. It's got an airport with one runway that's very busiest runway in the United States. Because it's an international airport. You've got a lot of flights that need to go in and out, a lot of flight delays because you've got the one runway to work with. And the city of San Diego has been struggling for a long time to figure out how to expand because it can't really doesn't have any space to build onto the existing airport, which means you

need to build a second facility. And there are a whole lot of options. One of the options they were looking at would have required a military facility to relocate, which the city is not eager to see happen. Uh, there's a lot of money that kills into having a military So what do you do. Well, there are a couple of different groups that have proposed, uh, the floating airport option, So one of them actually dates all the

way back to which that predates the mega Float. Now, the reason I decided to say Mega Float first instead of San Diego is that the Mega Float, at least a model of Mega float was built. No such luck with this approach. But in n a company called Float Incorporated.

Uh yeah, suggested a very large floating structure using a technology they called the Pneumatic stabilized platform or a PSP, which sounds like you would have an airport on a bunch of like pistons, like pneumatic pistons that could automatically adjust the pitch and roll so that it would maintain a relative like relative to the ground, it would it would look like it's staying flat, but relative to the ocean, it would just keep on making minute movements to This

made sense to me once I read about what they had in mind for the buoyancy. Uh so, so it was using the idea of trapped air. It's air trapped by the water, by the water pressure. I was just thinking of pneumatic systems, and I was making it way

more complicated than it really is. And in fact, there's their approach would be to have an airport resting on a collection of cylinders that are vertically aligned with the bottom open, so that you have this trapped air that's against the ocean at ocean surface, and it's the trapped air that is keeping the airport bulliant floating. And when I saw that I thought, Oh, this is this is way more simple of a machine, which is good because the simpler a machine, the less likely it is to

break down. You know, you don't want it to be too complicated, and I would I would imagine that underwater pistons would run into a little bit of mechanical problems probably at some point. At some point, there would be some maintenance issues sooner or later. But no, this makes sense if if you're trying to picture this, just think of, I don't know, take a series of drinking cups, turn them upside down, put some thing on top of them, and then put them in the water. To make it

really fun. Fill the drinking cups first, then empty them by drinking whatever it is you put in there. Then turn them upside down and put them in the water. Just making fun things. You're not allowed to go to the bathroom until you This is the summer edition of forward thinking. Um No, but that you're exactly right, that would be that would be a way of making like

a model of what this proposal was. Um So, the airport itself would have floated about three miles off the tip of Point Loma in San Diego, and they wanted to call it float Port UH, and it was going to be connected to the mainland via a tunnel that would empty out onto Interstate eight. The designers envision Floatport not just as an airport, but as a shipping facility. It would also be a mass transit hub for land,

sea and air. It's very ambitious kind of plan and they presented it to the to the city and in two thousand three San Diego formally rejected the proposal. They cited reasons including accessibility, safety, airfield configuration of the part that that part they were saying the way the the UM runways would be oriented would be in a north south direction and really it should be east west for

the best UH best performance considering airflow. But if you did it east west and you had it off the point off a point Loma, then it would end up requiring aircraft to fly in very low over a lot of neighborhoods. Thus you get that noise pollution again. So you have this issue like, well, if you do it north south, pilots are going to have more trouble landing

the aircraft, which is not good. And if you do it east west and you're going to create more noise pollution, which if your argument is that an offshore airport creates less noise pollution, you have invalidated that part of your support um the accessibility thing. They said, well, we're a little skeptical that you could read an underground or underwater tunnel to a floating structure that then attaches to the mainland. How do you do that in a way where if

the structure can move but the tunnel can't move. There's an issue there, like, what how does that work? And even if you could get to work, how expensive would that be? And how could you make sure that that structure would remain stable in all sorts of type types of situations. And so there was just a ton of skepticism, not to mention the worry about the environmental impact that was also an issue. But all that skepticism did not stop another team from putting together a similar proposal a

few years later. Right, So this gets us up to two thousand nine and Adam England, who was an entertainment lawyer, also has a couple of IMDb credits to his name. He's appeared in a couple of films. No relation to England. I looked it up. He is not related to Freddy Krueger. So, Freddy Krueger would help make a lot of really great floating puns. He could certainly make your dreams come true. So and so he decided to pitch his own floating airport idea to San Diego. Oh this is the one

with the good name. Yeah. Yeah, So he gathered together a group of collaborators and pitched the Ocean Works Offshore Airport. But the good name, I would argue, is his company. Right. Can we spell this first? Actually, I think it's funnier if you encounter it this way because it took me like four seconds to get it, and then I groaned audibly, right, because when you read it, you don't get the effect of the audible pun. So it's spelled eu pH l o t e A. And it's pronounced you floatia. Oh

I was thinking you floaty, you floatia. It is actually pronounced you floatia, as in like utopia. I'll take you floaty. Actually, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and jiff this. That's fair. That's fair. I pronounced Jeff as gift. I'm not going to argue that you pronounced it you floaty when it's clearly you floatia. So their design was more than just

an airport. It was a four story floating facility with an airport for a roof that could house any number of ventures, including hotels and restaurants, research facilities and more, as long as you don't mind the noise of an aircraft landing on top of your house every couple of minutes for every day. Ever, I don't know how they would have handled the noise issue for anyone in that facility,

like shooting ranges. Yeah, yeah, maybe um and And to be fair, this is a proposal that hasn't completely died as far as I know, England is still pushing for it. The structure he proposed would be three square miles in

surface area and have two runways. His plan called for it to be moored ten miles off the coast of Sandy Diego, with underwater light rail connecting it to the mainland, or instead of under water light rail if that was deemed infeasible, going with high speed ferries to just ship people back and forth from the mainland to the airport

and so on and so forth. According to England, it would have been more than two hundred million square feet of office space that would be available which was actually more than what was available in the city of San Diego itself, So you could double the amount of office space if you made it all a big office facility. UM. And the hope was that it would actually use renewable energy sources to power the whole thing, including generators that were using wave motions as well as wind power to

create electricity. And it would also have a desalination plan to make fresh drinking water from seawater. So it incorporates a lot of stuff we've talked about here on Forward Thinking. It's kind of I think we've talked about desalination for San Diego specific before. Yep, we've talked about and we've certainly talked about wind and wave power in the previous episodes. So the idea is that this would be kind of the the airport of the future that is self sufficient,

which is pretty cool idea. Still a lot of big problems, big big challenges, big questions like what is what is the ecological impact of such a thing if you were to build it. Uh, sure, it's it's generating power in a in a green way, but is it it's self green or would it be causing more harm just through its presence in the ocean. Furthermore, this sounds not unambitious.

How are you going to pay for this? Yeah, so he was actually already in the process of raising money for a thing he didn't have clearance to build, but it was. He figured it would be about twenty billion dollars to to build this thing. Uh, to me, that seems a little low, honestly for a four story floating airport that has two runways, twenty billion seems like it

might actually be a little on the conservative side. But according to some estimates, San Diego could lose out on as much as a hundred billion dollars in economic growth if it doesn't expand its airport by So if it cost twenty billion dollars and you argue, hey, we're gonna be out a hundred billion if we don't build something technically making dollars, yeah, you're you're or you're at least saving yourself from an eighty billion dollar loss, right, I mean,

if in fact all of those things are true, that's a big if. The plan, not surprisingly, was met with a lot of opposition. One of the biggest problems is that there's no regulatory agency for very large floating structures. There's there's no law or agency to to deal with that. You don't know who to ask permission, right exactly, Like like there's not a light. You go to the license office and there's not a window for very large floating structures.

So you're kind of stuck. And uh. As of two thousand thirteen, at least England still working to get permission to build and operate what was then being called the Oplex. Yeah, I you know, I don't name them. I just report on them. But yeah, I don't know if it's still like a living proposal that's being pushed in San Diego. If we have any fans in San Diego who are aware of this, I welcome you to get in touch

with us and let us know. All. The most recent stuff I could find was from a couple of years ago, so I don't know so it so it may have gone belly up, Yes, it might have been beached. This this one, more than even any of that, just reminds me too much of water World, honestly, Like, for some reasons, something about it reminds me of water World. To be fair, the desalination was for seawater and not for pe Well, how I mean, can you pe in the sea water?

I mean I have Will the station suspend people in cages over brine pits? Almost certainly? So? At any rate, this was this was one of those things that that when I saw it, I was like, I can't believe I've never heard of this. I mean, granted, I live on the other side of the United States, so it's not like it's an issue that is in the forefront of my mind. Have you ever flown into San Diego? Yes,

a couple of times. It is an exciting flight out let me tell you, because you fly out over the ocean, and when you're flying in, you're coming in over the ocean. So that's kind of terrifying because because you don't you don't land on the on the land side of it. You actually go out over the Pacific, turn back around, and then land on the on the landing strip. At least from memory, that's the way it is. I've flown in on the West Coast several times at several different airports,

so I might be mixing this up. But as I recall, it was pretty It was a pretty steep takeoff as well, I think for noise pollution purposes. Um, but yeah, I've flown in and out of San Diego a couple of times. It's lovely sitting by the way. I highly recommend visiting. It's one of my favorites in California. Fantastic, oh Man.

Mexican food in San Diego is amazing, phenomenal. But moving on to more floating airports, there's also been a couple of high profile proposals in good old London, so the Mexican food is probably not as good it is awful. I have had Mexican food in London and it is possibly the worst Mexican food I've ever had. It was also entertaining because I don't know if you know this.

The people, the Brits, they like they like spicy, spicy, spicy, melt your face off Indian food, right, which actually it's really, to be fair, it's more like British colonial food, but they love that. Yet their Mexican food was the most bland Mexican food I've ever had. I couldn't understand it

at any rate. Another issue they have, besides a lack of excellent Mexican restaurants in London, is that probably not there's no shortage of pigs there, but Uh, Heathrow Airport is really over text, I mean big time soonuper busy airport definitely, and it's also enormous. It is not laid out in a very easy way. You have to take different trains, Like if you land at terminal four and you need to get the terminal two, you're gonna be taking a couple of trains um to get there or

a bus. It's not it's not a simple layout and there's not a whole lot of room for expansion. Although Heathrow has petitioned to build another runway, it is not met with a lot of success, met with a lot of resistance because it's already kind of an issue with residents about you know, noise pollution, the same reasons we've talked about already. So there's been a couple of proposals

for an alternative airport. In one case what would be a supplemental airport, in another case what would be a complete placement for Heathrow, both of which have shared the same name. The first proposal was officially called the London Britannia Airport and it had the political backing of then

London Mayor Boris Johnson. Oh boy, howdy has here, especially like the day we record this is just after he has been named the UK Foreign Secretary, in the wake of the UK leaving the European Union or announcing his intention to leave the European un and a great number of politicians leaving office. Yes, Theresa May, the now new Prime Minister of the UK, came in and cleaned house.

A couple of people resigned, a couple of people were sacked, and Boris Johnson was given the role of Foreign Secretary and lots of jokes followed. Boris Johnson has not always been known as being the most diplomatic of diplomats, and yet now he has a diplomatic job. I'll tell you more about Boris Johnson and after we're done with this episode. So at any rate, he had he threw a lot of support in for this idea of the the London Britannia Airport, so much so that the locals began to

refer it to it as Boris Island. It was gonna be this, uh, this airport built out on the estuary of the Thames where the Thames meets the North Sea, and the original one was going to be I think thirty miles outside of London and was just gonna be um a relatively modest airport compared to the more recent proposal. It was going to be a four runway airport. Yeah.

One thing I found interesting, just as a side note, is that the architecture firm behind this proposal for the London Britannia Airport was actually Ginsler, who was the same firm that designed the Shanghai tower that we talked about

in our episode about skyscrapers in vertical cities. Yeah. That's so there's sort of like they seem out there in forward looking designs, right, if you want to get some something that is uh, kind of taking the risky approach, then uh, Ginsler seems to be like the name in some of those really you know, futuristic looking and sounding designs. So this one was formally rejected in two thousand and fourteen. Uh, and so it's it's kind of, I guess dead in

the water. But it was replaced by an even weirder plan, Yeah,

which which emerged in two thousand thirteen. So the two thousand thirteen proposal comes out the Airport Commission says no to the previous version, the four runway version, and this one also called the London Britannia Airport, so no confusion there, uh is a six runway airport, so even larger than the previously announced proposal, but it would be built built a bit further out in the estuary, fifty miles out site of London, and it actually originally there were two

different plans. The first plan was the idea of a real floating airport, but eventually they deemed that that was impractical because the waters of the estuary are relatively shallow and it would only really work in deeper water. So instead they're talking about essentially building an artificial island and putting the airport on top of it. So yes, and what wouldn't technically be a floating airport anymore, be an airport that's out on the water, but it would be

like on its own little island. Um estimated costs are somewhere around sixty billion dollars or more for this project. Now they would connect the airport to the mainland through a bridge for vehicle traffic, as well as an underwater light rail system to go back to London. And since it's fifty miles would be a bit of a trek if you landed there, and this would be an actual

replacement for Heathrow. It's not. This would be like Heathrow would be shut down and reclaimed by the city, turned into something else, and this would become London's new primary airport. You still have Gatwick, I imagine, but yeah, kind of interesting.

Um and the you know, the fact that Heathrow is considered to be the worst airport in terms of noise pollution in all of Europe means that there's at least some support for an airport that would be out over the water where that noise pollution wouldn't be bothering the residents and it would presumably improve the quality of life for a significant number of people living in London. Uh

So there's that argument. But a lot of people have said this is dependent upon a lot of factors that we can't be certain of, and we suspect that the bare minimum cost is going to be sixty billion dollars. It may very well be that it balloons out of control once these other factors turn out to be stuff we didn't anticipate, like getting a nice stable base for the airport takes a lot more work than they had

thought it would. That's a possibility um, and of course we also have a lot more opposition, not just political opposition. Heathrow clearly opposes the idea. They're like, no, we don't like the idea of being replaced. Please stop, give us another runway and stop talking about floating airports. And environmental agencies have also raised a lot of concerns the World Wildlife Fund to protect all of that precious life in the Thames Estuary. Well, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to

sound dismissive. Right, Well, you know, it's I don't know how rich and varied and bio diverse the life in the estuary is, but I figure it would be less so with a giant airpot. Yeah, I'm sure it is worth protecting. So, um, sorry for my jokes at the expense of the bountiest nature of the Thames. Brian shrimp living inside the Thames Estuary. Uh, yeah, so that we

may never see this come to pass. But again we're getting into that real problem of these major cities having real issues at hitting capacity for their their airports, and there's a need for more service, but there's a limit on the options. So it may come to be that within a decade or so that floating airports in a few areas are a thing because there's they're the best

of all the available options that are out there. Or maybe we'll see a switch to other types of fast travel that are not air travel and that will reduce our reliance upon air travel. So let's say the hyper loop becomes a more um realistic option, then you could see that at least for certain types of travel, like domestic travel or travel between countries that are very close together, it might not be as frequent high power ballistic passenger capsules.

You mean shooting people out of a cannon. Maybe. Okay, well I have one last one to talk about. This one is a little bit of a cheat because it's not a runway that's floating. It's a terminal that's floating. So it's it's the place where people go to gather before and after they're on a plane, not the place where planes take off and land. But still kind of cool. So back in two thousand fourteen, the Akhmad Yanni International Airport and Indonesia broke ground on an expansion that will

include a floating terminal. Uh So, if it can operate safely, that might also give some credence to other people who want to try and pursue similar projects to expand or replace airports in other cities. But if if it doesn't include the runway, floating terminal doesn't seem all that inherently different than a boat, like a cruise ship or something.

And I actually like this idea like that, like this is the idea out of all of this that kind of excites me because I'm like, well, if we can have floating buildings to augment our city escapes, that's that's rad. Like that, that's pretty okay, especially if if you are if it's acceptable to walk in and have like an old sea dog style accent whenever you walk into the building, We're all into this. Yeah, you know you instead of ringing a doorbell and saying, hey, how are you be?

Permission to come up bar? Permission granted, and then you eat you eat sea biscuits and get food, get scurvy. Okay, so it's not all wine and roses, but you know, it's got a it's got its own panache. Right at any rate, this was one of those ideas that when I saw the article on CNN, I thought, I don't I don't know how I've never heard of any of this because I love the retrofuturism of the popular Mechanics piece. I think that the proposals, while I still have lots

of questions about them, are are interesting. I don't necessarily think that they are all realistic or pragmatic, but I love the creative thought that goes into trying to solve a very difficult, very real problem. UM don't know that it's the right solution, but you know, it's it's a definitely a creative one. Yeah. I mean, it's another one of those things that airports are one of the uglier parts of what we do. And I don't mean, like

morally uglier, but it's just kind of like that. They're they're not one of the most pleasant artifacts of human civilization, yet they're so incredibly necessary for the world to function as it does. What's the nicest airport you've ever flown into? Because my answer might surprise you, Uh nicest, I did, like. I like the Keflavik Airport in Iceland. It was it was just it was nice. It was quite cool. You know. Uh, why about you, Lauren, I'm very fond of Atlanta's airports.

Airport's not bad, it's it's really I feel like it's well organized relatively for an airport. You know, it's relatively easy to understand where you need to go, even if it takes a heck of a lot of walking to get there. Right. Uh, there, there's one in the in the Midwest, somewhere, either Detroit or Chicago. I want to say that Troit a lovely like light tunnel that you travel through. It's like being in like Willy Wonka's a tunnel of terror, but better. Detroit is my favorite airport. Okay,

maybe this is the one that I'm thinking of. They have like super fancy, futuristic looking bars there where it's like, like the architecture is amazing. They have a have a light rail that takes you from one end of the terminal to the other. That is what I'm thinking of. Detroit is that's a great airport. Surprisingly, it surprised me because I had never been to Detroit before, and I had all the stereotypical prejudice about Detroit. Went to the airport,

thought this is the best airport I've been in. The second best, uh is not because the amenities, but just because of the charm, would be Kna, Hawaii, because it's all outdoors. You land, you walk, you walk down a set of stairs from your airplane to the tarmac, and you walk right and it's all like the thatched roof kind of little pavilions that you walk into. So it's all outside. If the weather is nice, it's lovely. Although the last time I flew out it was pouring down rain. Um.

But you know, who knows. Maybe in the future will say the nicest airport I've ever been in was off the coast of such and such. That'd be kind of cool. Uh So, guys, if you have any questions, queries you have, you've got some comments about this concept, maybe again, if you're in San Diego and you know more about the current status of that proposal, right us, let us know what you think. Our email addresses FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can always drop us

a line on social media. On Twitter, we are FW thinking. If you search fw thinking in Facebook, our profile should pop right up. You can leave us a message there. We look forward to hearing from you and talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota let's go places,