Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome Jock Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future. It says, right in
Speaker 1: the long in this big old jet plane, I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about my home. I'm job and Strick, and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick, and today we're going to be starting off
Speaker 1: with a little bit of wonderful retro futurism from the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. Yeah, this was something so I read an
Speaker 1: article in CNN that prompted me to look into this,
Speaker 1: and it all started with an article that came out
Speaker 1: in Popular Mechanics in January nineteen thirty. Now was that
Speaker 1: Popular Science or Popular Popular Mechanics. You can actually read
Speaker 1: the entire issue of January ninety Popular Mechanics on Google Books,
Speaker 1: and the whole thing is physically scanned in. There's a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of of those old back issues of that,
Speaker 1: and it's really fascinating for the advertisements and for the articles. Well,
Speaker 1: for one thing, you know that this was this was
Speaker 1: a small piece about the future of commercial flight. Because
Speaker 1: commercial flight was pretty young in n there hadn't been
Speaker 1: a whole lot of it yeah, the right, brothers, that
Speaker 1: was only like what three or yeah? And so there
Speaker 1: were bits of in the articles such as will you
Speaker 1: plummet from the sky? Uh? Will you, to which the
Speaker 1: answer was maybe, to be fair, I wonder that every
Speaker 1: time I get on an airplane. Yeah, I understand the physics,
Speaker 1: and I'm still like, right, right the whole scenes, in
Speaker 1: defiance of the laws of nature, we will take flight. Well,
Speaker 1: this this article had a tiny paragraph in it that
Speaker 1: was says aside for a specific uh subject, and that
Speaker 1: was this idea of airport built over the surface of
Speaker 1: the ocean, specifically, several airport built every four hundred miles
Speaker 1: or so across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and North America.
Speaker 1: And the idea was not that planes had to land
Speaker 1: in order to refuel, although that would definitely be a
Speaker 1: bonus because they could because they had already done long
Speaker 1: long distance flights before, but more for the comfort of passengers. Uh.
Speaker 1: The amenities aboard early commercial flights were let's say, even
Speaker 1: less impressive than flying coach today. Anyway, unless you were rich,
Speaker 1: in which case you might have all the comforts the
Speaker 1: wealthy could afford. Yes, you would, you would, you weren't
Speaker 1: so worried about speed, We're worried about luxury. But they
Speaker 1: wanted to put an airport about every four dred miles
Speaker 1: across the Atlantic. And it didn't go into a lot
Speaker 1: of detail about the actual mechanics of such a thing.
Speaker 1: It did essentially say that these airports wouldn't truly be
Speaker 1: floating on the ocean. They would be so ported by
Speaker 1: columns that reached all the way down to the sea floor,
Speaker 1: and in fact the airport itself would remain eighty feet
Speaker 1: suspended over the surface of the water, so would appear
Speaker 1: to float over the ocean, but it wouldn't truly be floating.
Speaker 1: But that's what we're gonna talk about today, are floating airports.
Speaker 1: Uh these, by the way, the ones that we're talking about,
Speaker 1: popular mechanics never happened. Uh, just no one wanted to
Speaker 1: put down the money. I guess according to popular mechanics,
Speaker 1: each floating airport would cost about twelve million dollars. So
Speaker 1: twelve million dollars about a hundred and seventy million dollars
Speaker 1: in today's money, which is actually a low estimate compared
Speaker 1: to some of the other plans that actual humans have
Speaker 1: actually cooked up. Right, right, well, it could very well
Speaker 1: be that Popular Mechanics was being overly optimistic about the
Speaker 1: construction costs of such an airport. So uh, it's it's
Speaker 1: just one of a few early suggestions of this kind
Speaker 1: of approach. There was actually another one that came along
Speaker 1: just a couple of years later. Yeah, in February nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty four issue of Popular Science that came across an
Speaker 1: article called Uncle Sam asked to build floating ocean airports.
Speaker 1: And it must be terrible when you're an icon and
Speaker 1: you're not even a real person and people come to
Speaker 1: you and like, hey, can you build a floating ocean
Speaker 1: airport for Build it? Build it for me. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: just asked Mr Peanut the other day if they would,
Speaker 1: you know, co sign on a homeland and that was
Speaker 1: probably unfair on me. Well, this was about a this
Speaker 1: Canadian inventor and engineer named Edward Robert Armstrong's long running
Speaker 1: idea for these things called seed romes, and these were
Speaker 1: truly as proposed floating airports. So a seed rome would
Speaker 1: be a one thousand, two hundred and twenty five foot
Speaker 1: long landing area and refueling station floating a hundred feet
Speaker 1: above the water on a series of twenty eight buoyancy
Speaker 1: tanks that are partially submerged and also had ballasts there
Speaker 1: to help, you know, prevent it from rocking too much
Speaker 1: in the waves and stuff like that. And these things
Speaker 1: would have overnight accommodations and they'd essentially be run like
Speaker 1: a ship. Also like a ship, the seed drome would
Speaker 1: have propellers for self guided navigation if necessary. They're under
Speaker 1: most circumstances. They would remain anchored in place by steel
Speaker 1: cables which are attached to a buoy which is in
Speaker 1: turn attached to a heavy sunken anchor. And if you
Speaker 1: all want to see what a picture of it looks like,
Speaker 1: I've got a little link here you can take a
Speaker 1: look at it. It looks like those great old retrofuturist
Speaker 1: illustrations of the you know, the future. It has great
Speaker 1: girders and beams and and all of that sort of
Speaker 1: industrial magic. That's wonderful. But so what it called for
Speaker 1: was sort of like you were talking about a series
Speaker 1: of stations throughout the Atlantic Ocean. It called for five
Speaker 1: seed dromes between the United States and Spain. It's at
Speaker 1: about at the latitude of Washington, d C. That would
Speaker 1: work as refueling stations for transatlantic flights, and the the
Speaker 1: sea drums would each be about three hours flight apart
Speaker 1: from each other. And one of the rational is given
Speaker 1: in the article. I don't know if there's really all
Speaker 1: that much to this, but what the article claimed was
Speaker 1: that planes could transport heavy payloads with greater speed since
Speaker 1: the refueling stations would require the planes to carry less
Speaker 1: fuel in addition to their payloads, so you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: to put all the fuel on board that it takes
Speaker 1: sticking across the ocean. You could just sort of, you know,
Speaker 1: fill up one fifth of the tank each time. But
Speaker 1: according to this article, the US government was quote interested
Speaker 1: in the proposal, and Armstrong was currently seeking federal funding
Speaker 1: for the project, and somehow it just didn't work out.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm guessing they should have asked someone
Speaker 1: besides just uncle Sam, right if I found at least
Speaker 1: Santa and the Easter Bunny to right it. Arguing arguing
Speaker 1: with a poster just doesn't trust me, I've been there,
Speaker 1: doesn't really get you anywhere. Oh. I imagine that there
Speaker 1: were several other things going on in this country other
Speaker 1: than like a pressing need to get more stops between
Speaker 1: US and certain parts of Europe. Well, Sam had this
Speaker 1: bizarre plan to build landing strips out of people. He
Speaker 1: was a saying, I want you to land planes on,
Speaker 1: and just a few years later there'll be plenty of
Speaker 1: unemployed to use them as ballast. Uh yeah, moving on
Speaker 1: from gallows humor. So these projects didn't work out, but
Speaker 1: it didn't stop people from thinking about the floating airport
Speaker 1: concept in general, and in fact it has There's gonna
Speaker 1: be so many puns in this, and I apologize resurfaced
Speaker 1: many decades later, and uh you might wanna know, like, well,
Speaker 1: why would anyone be interested in a floating airport in
Speaker 1: the first place, Like what's why not build a regular airport? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's the appeal? Well, I mean, part of this is
Speaker 1: to think about what is the purpose of an airport.
Speaker 1: Obviously it's to land planes. But you can't land a
Speaker 1: plane just anywhere you're want to land it closer to
Speaker 1: the destinations where people want to go. So, uh so
Speaker 1: land scarcity and local land scarcity matters. And it's not
Speaker 1: that there's not enough land on Earth to land airplanes on.
Speaker 1: That in many cases there's not enough flat stable real
Speaker 1: estate near the big population center where people are trying
Speaker 1: to get to write. Yeah. No one is saying that
Speaker 1: New York State does not have enough land in it,
Speaker 1: but the isle of Manhattan specifically not large. It's pretty
Speaker 1: it's pretty jampacked with stuff already. Yeah. Yeah, there's There
Speaker 1: are a lot of places around the world where the
Speaker 1: populations are either coming close to reaching the capacity that
Speaker 1: their airport can provide or are beyond that capacity. And
Speaker 1: it's not as simple as saying, well, why don't you
Speaker 1: just build another runway, because sometimes there's just not any
Speaker 1: space to do that. You can't really add on to
Speaker 1: some existing airports. And then the other, the other alternative,
Speaker 1: is to build an additional airport. There may not be
Speaker 1: any flat land near the city that's available for that.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about Japan. That's a great example. Japan
Speaker 1: has extremely densely populated cities, and it also there's not
Speaker 1: a lot of flat land. Sure, yeah, and well and
Speaker 1: and furthermore, when you start talking about building a second airport,
Speaker 1: then you're getting into that problem that we've discussed before
Speaker 1: on this show about adding um uh more infrastructure problems.
Speaker 1: Rather than kind of doubling up with the infrastructure that
Speaker 1: you've already built. Yeah. Well, and actually in there's some
Speaker 1: cases where there's been discussion of creating a floating airport
Speaker 1: to completely replace an existing airport, so it's not even
Speaker 1: to just supplement what is already there. And maybe that
Speaker 1: we could raise that parking lot and put up some
Speaker 1: more high rise condos. Yeah. Yeah, boy, market has really
Speaker 1: opened our eyes to the future, hasn't it? Okay anyway,
Speaker 1: So land scarcity is obviously a big issue. That's probably
Speaker 1: a reason number one why people have looked at floating airports.
Speaker 1: The idea that if you can't really find flat ground
Speaker 1: that is not already taken up by something else, what
Speaker 1: about any water that's nearby. You don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about flat ground there you can if you can build
Speaker 1: something on water and make sure it's steady enough, then
Speaker 1: that could solve a lot of issues depending on where
Speaker 1: the city is. Obviously you kind of had to be
Speaker 1: near water, but a lot of our major population areas
Speaker 1: happened to be because well, I don't know if you notice,
Speaker 1: but water is something that we need. Also, trade routes
Speaker 1: having been what they were for a long time. Yes,
Speaker 1: seaports were kind of a thing. Our city of Atlanta
Speaker 1: is kind of an exception because we were sort of
Speaker 1: a a stop for a lot of different land routes
Speaker 1: along the Eastern Seaboard rails. Yeah, yeah, I mean Atlanta
Speaker 1: used to be terminus. It was the place where all
Speaker 1: these rail lines terminated. And uh so it's a little different.
Speaker 1: But but most cities tend to be not too far
Speaker 1: from a coastal region and that's where you could put
Speaker 1: something like a floating airport. Honestly, be a lot harder
Speaker 1: to do it in the mountains. So that's reason number one.
Speaker 1: Another reason, though, is the idea of cutting back on
Speaker 1: noise pollution. And it's not that an airport over the
Speaker 1: water would magically be more quiet. It's that there aren't
Speaker 1: as many people living on open water. So air airplanes
Speaker 1: coming down and landing at an airport that's on open water,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have as much noise pollution there because it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be affecting anybody. I mean, the noise would be there,
Speaker 1: it just wouldn't be affecting people right right, And and
Speaker 1: that's more than just an annoyance. If you live in
Speaker 1: an area with heavy continual noise pollution, like an airport
Speaker 1: that puts adults at possible risk for hypertension and thus
Speaker 1: cardigio vascular disease, and kids in that situation could be
Speaker 1: at risk for stuff like impaired reading, comprehension and long
Speaker 1: term memory plus higher blood pressure. Again. Um, so getting
Speaker 1: that kind of industry out of our neighborhoods could do
Speaker 1: real good for people. Yeah. So there's there's some actual
Speaker 1: like positives that you can point at right way and say,
Speaker 1: all right, all right, I can see why you would
Speaker 1: consider this, But there's there's some also potential negative impacts
Speaker 1: as well. Doesn't sound cheap, super not cheap, I'm guessing
Speaker 1: un cheap, But there's an opposite cheap there is, it's expensive,
Speaker 1: and that's what this would be. Yes, But aside from
Speaker 1: the monetary thing, there's also environmental concerns because you know,
Speaker 1: it is taking a source of noise, pollution and heat
Speaker 1: sink due to all that pavement and you know local
Speaker 1: land environment destruction and putting all that bad stuff smack
Speaker 1: into the middle of an ocean. Uh? Is that good? Times?
Speaker 1: Is that worth it? Yeah? And when we get into
Speaker 1: talking about specifics, I'll mention some of the the uh,
Speaker 1: the stuff that various groups have said like, oh, the
Speaker 1: invinmal impact would be minimal. Um, I'm somewhat skeptical of that,
Speaker 1: at least in a few cases. I'm I'm pretty highly skeptical.
Speaker 1: I think that in general, when you're covering a few
Speaker 1: square miles of ocean space with something that didn't used
Speaker 1: to be there before, there's probably going to be an
Speaker 1: environmental impact, some kind of impact. And oceans, as we
Speaker 1: have said before, are tricky. There's more ocean than truck.
Speaker 1: So negative negative, Um, no, absolutely, you're absolutely right. Hey,
Speaker 1: but wait a minute, I've got a question. Sure, Okay,
Speaker 1: don't we already have floating airports because I've seen pictures
Speaker 1: of aircraft carriers. It looks kind of like that's sort
Speaker 1: of what they are, so kind of if you fly
Speaker 1: a fighter jet, and I do want I was about
Speaker 1: to say it was learning so much more about Lauren today.
Speaker 1: So yeah. It wasn't long after the invention of heavier
Speaker 1: than air aircraft that people started saying, huh, I wonder
Speaker 1: if you could put it on a boat. Brave pilots
Speaker 1: some might say crazy, began to experiment with trying landing
Speaker 1: on and taking off from oats. In fact, that the
Speaker 1: earliest aircraft carriers were converted merchant vessels, where they built
Speaker 1: a flat deck on top of the existing boat's deck
Speaker 1: and then asked people to kind of try and take
Speaker 1: off from it or land on it. The earliest attempts,
Speaker 1: by the way, not a successful but this developed over
Speaker 1: time and you began to see actual ships dedicated from
Speaker 1: the design process all the way through construction to be
Speaker 1: an aircraft carrier. And so before World War Two we
Speaker 1: had dedicated aircraft carriers sailing around the ocean. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think the British had the earliest ones. Now they
Speaker 1: tend to be relatively small compared to a commercial airport runway.
Speaker 1: The runways on aircraft carriers maybe might be about three
Speaker 1: feet long, and they often use catapult systems. In fact,
Speaker 1: they all have some form of catapult system to propel
Speaker 1: a jet forward so that it gets the speed necessary
Speaker 1: to take off. So to catch them kind of, they've
Speaker 1: got a cabling system where that when the jet is landing,
Speaker 1: a hook catches a cable and that helps the jet
Speaker 1: come to a stop instead of just rolling right off
Speaker 1: the other end of the aircraft carrier and into the ocean.
Speaker 1: So that's a very short runway three feet is incredibly short.
Speaker 1: A medium sized commercial aircraft requires a runway of six
Speaker 1: thousand feet. It was a way bigger times twenty times longer,
Speaker 1: and larger jets need even longer runways like eight thousand feet.
Speaker 1: So what are you gonna do? The obvious solution here
Speaker 1: is to have passengers flying Harrier jets. Yeah, that that
Speaker 1: sounds great. It might be a little expensive, and you
Speaker 1: might be you might be tying your luggage to the
Speaker 1: outside of the jet, but it would definitely be an
Speaker 1: exciting trip. Biscoff cookies and I don't know that you'd
Speaker 1: be holding onto your cookies and a Harrier jet honestly. Uh.
Speaker 1: Although I've always wanted to fly in a like, I
Speaker 1: have an experience of being able to fly in one
Speaker 1: of those, either a stunt plane or a fighter jet
Speaker 1: type of thing that's anyone out their college. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: still waiting on my hook up for a helicopter. But
Speaker 1: you mean a shorter, vertical takeoff jet or just any
Speaker 1: fighters Really, any fighter jet vertical takeoff and landing jet
Speaker 1: would be super cool. But really, any jet is what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. But no, that's not really a practical solution. Obviously,
Speaker 1: So if we wanted to build a floating airport, it
Speaker 1: would have to be of a significant length in order
Speaker 1: to meet the requirements of commercial aircraft. Um and then
Speaker 1: also with the aircraft carriers, the traditional kind, they have
Speaker 1: some problems with pitch and roll. I mean, obviously if
Speaker 1: it's if the if the swells are really really big
Speaker 1: and the aircraft carrier is in fact moving, it makes
Speaker 1: it much more difficult to have a safe landing on
Speaker 1: that that surface, and that might be a level of
Speaker 1: risk that could be acceptable in some military applications, but
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be acceptable in a commercial flight. So you
Speaker 1: have to have a surface that is going to be
Speaker 1: as steady as you can possibly make it, and that
Speaker 1: means you have to come up with an alternative to
Speaker 1: your classic aircraft carrier. But people have done this, like
Speaker 1: we were saying before, like this is a thing that
Speaker 1: people have gotten through a number of planning stages for. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we've even had a model made of this and had
Speaker 1: aircraft land and take off from such a model. That
Speaker 1: model would be one that was constructed in the mid
Speaker 1: ninety nineties. That's when a group of companies, mostly shipbuilders,
Speaker 1: got together in Tokyo to discuss the possibility of constructing
Speaker 1: what we now call very large floating structures or vl
Speaker 1: F s is I love I love it when the
Speaker 1: word large is in any kind of acronym. I like
Speaker 1: it with the word very Consider their very large floating structures,
Speaker 1: thank you very much. Uh. And it was specifically for
Speaker 1: the purposes of an offshore airport, although they proposed other
Speaker 1: uses for such a structure as well, and they wanted
Speaker 1: it to float in Tokyo Bay, and so they formed
Speaker 1: what they called the Technological Research Association of Mega Float.
Speaker 1: Mega Float. It's not a transformer, sadly, uh they Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I guess it transformed from lots of smaller
Speaker 1: segments into a very big segment. Yeah, because they built
Speaker 1: it out in sections exactly tiles almost. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: of I think of like like like old hot wheels
Speaker 1: tracks where they snapped together. It's kind of the same
Speaker 1: sort of idea. So so each segment was pretty huge,
Speaker 1: as by sixty uh. And the overall length of the
Speaker 1: full airport. If they were to build the big thing,
Speaker 1: it would have been five thousand meters long, and four
Speaker 1: thousand meters would be runways. Five thousand meters long for
Speaker 1: for our non meter readers is about three point one miles.
Speaker 1: That's a big floating structure. Yeah, yeah, And so the
Speaker 1: actual individual segments, I just had a question. I never
Speaker 1: thought of this before. I don't know what the answer is. Well,
Speaker 1: what is the largest floating structure ever created by humans?
Speaker 1: That's an excellent question. And I don't know the answer either,
Speaker 1: because I didn't think about it before we did this,
Speaker 1: but I would imagine it couldn't be much larger than
Speaker 1: that for a floating structure. Most of the floating structures
Speaker 1: I know about that are big or things like oil rigs,
Speaker 1: and they're they're large, but they're not three point one
Speaker 1: miles in size large, at least not the ones I'm
Speaker 1: aware of. Um. In this case, the actual individual tiles
Speaker 1: themselves were big. Three hundred meters by sixty Now that
Speaker 1: means that's more than three d yards, which means that
Speaker 1: these individual tiles were longer than three football fields laid down,
Speaker 1: you know, end to end. And they each of these
Speaker 1: segments were built on on tanks that you know, sealed
Speaker 1: tanks that allowed it to float. That's what created the buoyancy.
Speaker 1: And so you had these floating segments that then were
Speaker 1: towed into Tokyo Bay snapped together. Uh, they had a
Speaker 1: series of clamps Joe, and then welded together. They actually
Speaker 1: talked about how they had to you know, there might
Speaker 1: be water in some chambers that would have to be
Speaker 1: pumped out. They'd then be welld and sealed together, welded
Speaker 1: and sealed together, and then ultimately you got this one
Speaker 1: thousand meter long runway that was kind of the scale
Speaker 1: model for the overall airport. Um they hypothesized that due
Speaker 1: to the size of the structure, it would be so
Speaker 1: large that would span multiple wave cycles. So you know,
Speaker 1: ocean waves are physical waves, but they behave the same
Speaker 1: as other types of waves. And in fact, the idea
Speaker 1: was that the structure would be so large, then the
Speaker 1: waves that would encounter the mega float would cancel each
Speaker 1: other out so that you would you would not get
Speaker 1: a net movement with the actual airport. You would only
Speaker 1: get a tiny, little little deflection, like a little deflective
Speaker 1: movement due to the waves. And it was referred to
Speaker 1: as the hydro elastic response or just elastic response, although
Speaker 1: in the report they said it was quote hardly noticeable
Speaker 1: in quote but to be fair they said, even though
Speaker 1: it was a minute amount of movement, they wanted to
Speaker 1: do extensive testing to make sure that this was not
Speaker 1: gonna end up causing any you know, issues, any safety
Speaker 1: concerns for aircraft. Obviously, that would be a flaw so
Speaker 1: great to cause them to completely abandon the project entirely.
Speaker 1: So they determined, this probably isn't gonna be a problem.
Speaker 1: We will test it to be absolutely sure. And they
Speaker 1: began to test this and said that everything seemed to
Speaker 1: go pretty well. Um, however, uh, they it's not there anymore.
Speaker 1: What happened, Well, they tested it and then the experiment
Speaker 1: was over. Then they dismantled it. I mean again, it
Speaker 1: was only meant to be a model, like a thousand
Speaker 1: meter long model. Um. They were able to show that
Speaker 1: there were some interesting safety features here. Uh. They showed
Speaker 1: that the overall structure could remain bulliant even if one
Speaker 1: section suffered damage. They said, if there were a catastrophic crash,
Speaker 1: and of course you hope that never happens, but if
Speaker 1: there were, then depending upon the level of damage, the
Speaker 1: structure should still remain fine. For one thing, if there
Speaker 1: was a fiery accident, most of that heat would dissipate
Speaker 1: into the air, it wouldn't transfer into the structure itself.
Speaker 1: The structure is made out of steel, which is pretty
Speaker 1: resilient stuff. Uh. The if it crat the top of
Speaker 1: the tanks, it should still remain fine. Uh. And if
Speaker 1: it even caused cracks all the way through the tanks
Speaker 1: to the bottom, it still would remain bulliant, assuming that
Speaker 1: it's damaged just one section, because the other sections would
Speaker 1: keep it floating, and so then you could send in
Speaker 1: repair crews to repair whatever the damage was and keep
Speaker 1: the whole structure safe as a result. Um. They also
Speaker 1: talked about how with it being segmented, if you're talking
Speaker 1: about like a massive damage where you need to replace
Speaker 1: a segment, it's more or less modular, so you could
Speaker 1: in theory do that. It would still you know, the
Speaker 1: airport would have to go offline for a significant amount
Speaker 1: of time, but you could remove a segment and replace
Speaker 1: it with a new one if that was absolutely necessary. Now,
Speaker 1: with a structure like this, I would be kind of
Speaker 1: worried about what might happen in the case of extreme
Speaker 1: whether events or like a tsunami exactly, or a heavy
Speaker 1: storm or an earthquake. Right, So, it's supposed to be
Speaker 1: earthquake proof unlike a normal airport, so not only earthquake proof,
Speaker 1: but to the point where you could potentially continue to
Speaker 1: operate the airport in an earthquake situation, so you'd be
Speaker 1: able to have people landing and not just circling the
Speaker 1: city until you know, an assessment can be made as
Speaker 1: to whether or not the airport is safe to land on.
Speaker 1: Uh So that's interesting, and they even said that it
Speaker 1: could be tsunami proof because it'd be far enough out
Speaker 1: in the bay where the swell of water would not
Speaker 1: be so great. They talked about how the swell of
Speaker 1: water gets the tallest as it approaches land, and that
Speaker 1: it would be far enough out where it would be
Speaker 1: able to weather that without it having a significant impact
Speaker 1: on the movement of the airport itself. It would only
Speaker 1: be after it passed through where the airport had been
Speaker 1: moored off the coast of uh Tokyo that a tsunami
Speaker 1: wave would be large enough to to start affecting people,
Speaker 1: and by then it had already passed where the airport was.
Speaker 1: But that is important to note that it is it
Speaker 1: is a structure that would be moored, it would be
Speaker 1: tied to essentially an anchor point or several anchor points
Speaker 1: that it couldn't float away. Right, You don't just talk like,
Speaker 1: so have you been to the airport lately? I would
Speaker 1: have gone yesterday, but I don't know where it is now.
Speaker 1: Last I saw it was sailing towards China, Like that
Speaker 1: would be awkward. Um, so, yeah, they has a mooring
Speaker 1: point where it would be anchored to the mainland um
Speaker 1: or at least the rest of Japan in this case.
Speaker 1: So it was really interesting. Again, I don't know how
Speaker 1: much credence to give the report. It wasn't like this
Speaker 1: was an investigation by a third party that said, hey,
Speaker 1: we looked into this, we looked at their experiment. It
Speaker 1: all seems to be on the up and up. This
Speaker 1: was a report filed by the very entity that had
Speaker 1: an interest in having And now, granted, I would imagine
Speaker 1: any entity that does have an interest in building this
Speaker 1: would want to be as transparent as possible because if
Speaker 1: something were to go wrong, that's a huge amount of accountability. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't want to say, ah, yeah, this airport, it's
Speaker 1: gonna work fine for you. I gotta leave town, but
Speaker 1: this airport is gonna be great for you guys. Hopefully
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be like, yeah, we checked all the safety
Speaker 1: bring all your orphans and kittens, right, We're gonna be
Speaker 1: just like you know, fruit stands and big panes of
Speaker 1: glass and nuns, everything that you know you don't want
Speaker 1: to be involved in, like your your basic car chase. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why are you chase? Because I was just sitting there
Speaker 1: and think, like all the things that automatically mean that
Speaker 1: you are going to see something really dangerous happen. You
Speaker 1: can just put that out there. Actually, to be fair,
Speaker 1: they even said that an alternate use for these structures
Speaker 1: well an emergency gathering place. The idea that if there were,
Speaker 1: say a massive earthquake, you could you could evacuate people,
Speaker 1: or you know, there's a tsunami on the way, you
Speaker 1: could evacuate people to one of these very large floating
Speaker 1: structures where they would be out of harm's way for
Speaker 1: the duration of that event. Now, it may very well
Speaker 1: mean that there's still lots of work to be done afterward,
Speaker 1: because the city itself could be you know, very much
Speaker 1: affected by it, but the people, the human lives could
Speaker 1: be saved, and you could make this an emergency response
Speaker 1: kind of situation, even to the point where if you
Speaker 1: had constructed these pieces but had not yet deployed them,
Speaker 1: you could send them to a place where you know
Speaker 1: there's going to be a problem and it could serve
Speaker 1: as like almost like an emergency raft for hundreds or
Speaker 1: thousands of people. Just kind of cool, really. And they
Speaker 1: also had a segment about the environmental impact, and here's
Speaker 1: where some more skepticism comes in. They said the environmental
Speaker 1: impact would be minimal. Really. The biggest thing it would
Speaker 1: impact would be fight o plankton, which would just move
Speaker 1: all away to a different area around the megastructure, and
Speaker 1: then the zoo plankton would follow the phytoplankton, and fish
Speaker 1: would follow the zoo plank Yeah, everything be cool, and
Speaker 1: it's just floating. It's not like there's anything disturbing the seabed.
Speaker 1: So really just except for the mooring. Yeah, well but
Speaker 1: the mooring. The mooring points exist anyway, It's just that
Speaker 1: the structure would be moored to an existing mooring point
Speaker 1: because you're talking about a big bay. But I mean,
Speaker 1: you would literally be casting shade on the sea floor.
Speaker 1: You know that, you guys are just silently judging me.
Speaker 1: I was waiting for Jo to react. Sometimes's reactions are
Speaker 1: really beautiful. Uh no, No, I'm I'm so I'm so
Speaker 1: dubious about this thing, about that environmental impact part. But
Speaker 1: it's you know, I'm sure it's it's really just like
Speaker 1: like the potential for for chemical runoffs. Sure, yeah, you
Speaker 1: have jet fuel, you have exhaust from the planes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've got oil that's going into places. That oil goes
Speaker 1: into all kinds of stuff on a flat surface that's
Speaker 1: on the ocean, right, So then heavy rain hits that
Speaker 1: there's going to be runoff, and they have some kind
Speaker 1: of collective technology. It needs a lip. It's like it
Speaker 1: needs to be like a rimmed baking pants, like like
Speaker 1: a serious set of gutters. Yeah exactly. Yeah, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: and it's very possible that it incorporated something along those
Speaker 1: lines in order to do that. But I didn't come
Speaker 1: across that in any of my research. I'd just be
Speaker 1: concerned and I'm like harping on this now, I feel like,
Speaker 1: but but I'd be so concerned about all of that
Speaker 1: pavement that you use. Pavement absorbs heat, that heat goes somewhere,
Speaker 1: is it distributed down into the water. Are we warming
Speaker 1: oceans further? Well? I did read something about what one
Speaker 1: of these one of these floating I can't remember which one,
Speaker 1: Maybe Jonathan you'll recall that said like, look, you know,
Speaker 1: even if there's a fire, this thing will be fine. Line.
Speaker 1: It's it's just that was megafloat said. They said that
Speaker 1: fire would be completely contained locally and the structure would
Speaker 1: be fine. Are the fish chill about it? I think
Speaker 1: they said it was According to them, again, it would
Speaker 1: just radiate upward direct That's what they're saying was heat
Speaker 1: would dissipate in the air. But I mean, honestly, without
Speaker 1: without seeing a third party investigation on this and seeing
Speaker 1: what the environmental impact is, I I like you, Lauren,
Speaker 1: I I feel that there's probably a larger impact than
Speaker 1: we are led to believe in the report. I I
Speaker 1: suppose that there could be some kind of thermal insulators
Speaker 1: to prevent any heat that happens on the top of
Speaker 1: the surface from bleeding down through the bottom. And it's
Speaker 1: also possible that Tokyo Bay may already be an environment
Speaker 1: that is not the most conducive to life. But that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean we should make it worse. Come on, let's
Speaker 1: go for blink you the four eyed fish. But at
Speaker 1: any rate, so that that was an experiment and by
Speaker 1: two thousand they had dismantled it. They continued to analyze
Speaker 1: the data, but it the mega float no longer exists.
Speaker 1: It is not in Tokyo Bay anymore. But there was
Speaker 1: talk of a sequel, the revenge Megafloat returns or Electric Boogaloo.
Speaker 1: Well it's called it was going to be called Megafloat too,
Speaker 1: but so far it hasn't come together because it's modular. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hasn't happened yet, but there was talk of doing it,
Speaker 1: so it may still happen at some point, but it hasn't.
Speaker 1: Um it hasn't happened since two thousands. So and yet
Speaker 1: there's still this need to increase that that capacity for
Speaker 1: air travels. So it could be that it's revisited in
Speaker 1: the future. Yeah, but could we consider that talk scuttled? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that the that idea has has just sunk. Yeah, okay, guys,
Speaker 1: that do we do we have any other proposals to
Speaker 1: talk about? Plenty? Yeah, the couple in San Diego, San
Speaker 1: Diego desperately needs another airport. Yeah, so San Diego, you've
Speaker 1: got a city, big city southern California. It's got an
Speaker 1: airport with one runway that's very busiest runway in the
Speaker 1: United States. Because it's an international airport. You've got a
Speaker 1: lot of flights that need to go in and out,
Speaker 1: a lot of flight delays because you've got the one
Speaker 1: runway to work with. And the city of San Diego
Speaker 1: has been struggling for a long time to figure out
Speaker 1: how to expand because it can't really doesn't have any
Speaker 1: space to build onto the existing airport, which means you
Speaker 1: need to build a second facility. And there are a
Speaker 1: whole lot of options. One of the options they were
Speaker 1: looking at would have required a military facility to relocate,
Speaker 1: which the city is not eager to see happen. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of money that kills into having a
Speaker 1: military So what do you do. Well, there are a
Speaker 1: couple of different groups that have proposed, uh, the floating
Speaker 1: airport option, So one of them actually dates all the
Speaker 1: way back to which that predates the mega Float. Now,
Speaker 1: the reason I decided to say Mega Float first instead
Speaker 1: of San Diego is that the Mega Float, at least
Speaker 1: a model of Mega float was built. No such luck
Speaker 1: with this approach. But in n a company called Float Incorporated.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, suggested a very large floating structure using a
Speaker 1: technology they called the Pneumatic stabilized platform or a PSP,
Speaker 1: which sounds like you would have an airport on a
Speaker 1: bunch of like pistons, like pneumatic pistons that could automatically
Speaker 1: adjust the pitch and roll so that it would maintain
Speaker 1: a relative like relative to the ground, it would it
Speaker 1: would look like it's staying flat, but relative to the ocean,
Speaker 1: it would just keep on making minute movements to This
Speaker 1: made sense to me once I read about what they
Speaker 1: had in mind for the buoyancy. Uh so, so it
Speaker 1: was using the idea of trapped air. It's air trapped
Speaker 1: by the water, by the water pressure. I was just
Speaker 1: thinking of pneumatic systems, and I was making it way
Speaker 1: more complicated than it really is. And in fact, there's
Speaker 1: their approach would be to have an airport resting on
Speaker 1: a collection of cylinders that are vertically aligned with the
Speaker 1: bottom open, so that you have this trapped air that's
Speaker 1: against the ocean at ocean surface, and it's the trapped
Speaker 1: air that is keeping the airport bulliant floating. And when
Speaker 1: I saw that I thought, Oh, this is this is
Speaker 1: way more simple of a machine, which is good because
Speaker 1: the simpler a machine, the less likely it is to
Speaker 1: break down. You know, you don't want it to be
Speaker 1: too complicated, and I would I would imagine that underwater
Speaker 1: pistons would run into a little bit of mechanical problems
Speaker 1: probably at some point. At some point, there would be
Speaker 1: some maintenance issues sooner or later. But no, this makes
Speaker 1: sense if if you're trying to picture this, just think of,
Speaker 1: I don't know, take a series of drinking cups, turn
Speaker 1: them upside down, put some thing on top of them,
Speaker 1: and then put them in the water. To make it
Speaker 1: really fun. Fill the drinking cups first, then empty them
Speaker 1: by drinking whatever it is you put in there. Then
Speaker 1: turn them upside down and put them in the water.
Speaker 1: Just making fun things. You're not allowed to go to
Speaker 1: the bathroom until you This is the summer edition of
Speaker 1: forward thinking. Um No, but that you're exactly right, that
Speaker 1: would be that would be a way of making like
Speaker 1: a model of what this proposal was. Um So, the
Speaker 1: airport itself would have floated about three miles off the
Speaker 1: tip of Point Loma in San Diego, and they wanted
Speaker 1: to call it float Port UH, and it was going
Speaker 1: to be connected to the mainland via a tunnel that
Speaker 1: would empty out onto Interstate eight. The designers envision Floatport
Speaker 1: not just as an airport, but as a shipping facility.
Speaker 1: It would also be a mass transit hub for land,
Speaker 1: sea and air. It's very ambitious kind of plan and
Speaker 1: they presented it to the to the city and in
Speaker 1: two thousand three San Diego formally rejected the proposal. They
Speaker 1: cited reasons including accessibility, safety, airfield configuration of the part
Speaker 1: that that part they were saying the way the the
Speaker 1: UM runways would be oriented would be in a north
Speaker 1: south direction and really it should be east west for
Speaker 1: the best UH best performance considering airflow. But if you
Speaker 1: did it east west and you had it off the
Speaker 1: point off a point Loma, then it would end up
Speaker 1: requiring aircraft to fly in very low over a lot
Speaker 1: of neighborhoods. Thus you get that noise pollution again. So
Speaker 1: you have this issue like, well, if you do it
Speaker 1: north south, pilots are going to have more trouble landing
Speaker 1: the aircraft, which is not good. And if you do
Speaker 1: it east west and you're going to create more noise pollution,
Speaker 1: which if your argument is that an offshore airport creates
Speaker 1: less noise pollution, you have invalidated that part of your
Speaker 1: support um the accessibility thing. They said, well, we're a
Speaker 1: little skeptical that you could read an underground or underwater
Speaker 1: tunnel to a floating structure that then attaches to the mainland.
Speaker 1: How do you do that in a way where if
Speaker 1: the structure can move but the tunnel can't move. There's
Speaker 1: an issue there, like, what how does that work? And
Speaker 1: even if you could get to work, how expensive would
Speaker 1: that be? And how could you make sure that that
Speaker 1: structure would remain stable in all sorts of type types
Speaker 1: of situations. And so there was just a ton of skepticism,
Speaker 1: not to mention the worry about the environmental impact that
Speaker 1: was also an issue. But all that skepticism did not
Speaker 1: stop another team from putting together a similar proposal a
Speaker 1: few years later. Right, So this gets us up to
Speaker 1: two thousand nine and Adam England, who was an entertainment lawyer,
Speaker 1: also has a couple of IMDb credits to his name.
Speaker 1: He's appeared in a couple of films. No relation to England.
Speaker 1: I looked it up. He is not related to Freddy Krueger. So,
Speaker 1: Freddy Krueger would help make a lot of really great
Speaker 1: floating puns. He could certainly make your dreams come true.
Speaker 1: So and so he decided to pitch his own floating
Speaker 1: airport idea to San Diego. Oh this is the one
Speaker 1: with the good name. Yeah. Yeah, So he gathered together
Speaker 1: a group of collaborators and pitched the Ocean Works Offshore Airport.
Speaker 1: But the good name, I would argue, is his company. Right.
Speaker 1: Can we spell this first? Actually, I think it's funnier
Speaker 1: if you encounter it this way because it took me
Speaker 1: like four seconds to get it, and then I groaned audibly, right,
Speaker 1: because when you read it, you don't get the effect
Speaker 1: of the audible pun. So it's spelled eu pH l
Speaker 1: o t e A. And it's pronounced you floatia. Oh
Speaker 1: I was thinking you floaty, you floatia. It is actually
Speaker 1: pronounced you floatia, as in like utopia. I'll take you floaty. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm going to go ahead and jiff this. That's fair.
Speaker 1: That's fair. I pronounced Jeff as gift. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to argue that you pronounced it you floaty when it's
Speaker 1: clearly you floatia. So their design was more than just
Speaker 1: an airport. It was a four story floating facility with
Speaker 1: an airport for a roof that could house any number
Speaker 1: of ventures, including hotels and restaurants, research facilities and more,
Speaker 1: as long as you don't mind the noise of an
Speaker 1: aircraft landing on top of your house every couple of
Speaker 1: minutes for every day. Ever, I don't know how they
Speaker 1: would have handled the noise issue for anyone in that facility,
Speaker 1: like shooting ranges. Yeah, yeah, maybe um and And to
Speaker 1: be fair, this is a proposal that hasn't completely died
Speaker 1: as far as I know, England is still pushing for it.
Speaker 1: The structure he proposed would be three square miles in
Speaker 1: surface area and have two runways. His plan called for
Speaker 1: it to be moored ten miles off the coast of
Speaker 1: Sandy Diego, with underwater light rail connecting it to the mainland,
Speaker 1: or instead of under water light rail if that was
Speaker 1: deemed infeasible, going with high speed ferries to just ship
Speaker 1: people back and forth from the mainland to the airport
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth. According to England, it
Speaker 1: would have been more than two hundred million square feet
Speaker 1: of office space that would be available which was actually
Speaker 1: more than what was available in the city of San
Speaker 1: Diego itself, So you could double the amount of office
Speaker 1: space if you made it all a big office facility. UM.
Speaker 1: And the hope was that it would actually use renewable
Speaker 1: energy sources to power the whole thing, including generators that
Speaker 1: were using wave motions as well as wind power to
Speaker 1: create electricity. And it would also have a desalination plan
Speaker 1: to make fresh drinking water from seawater. So it incorporates
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff we've talked about here on Forward Thinking.
Speaker 1: It's kind of I think we've talked about desalination for
Speaker 1: San Diego specific before. Yep, we've talked about and we've
Speaker 1: certainly talked about wind and wave power in the previous episodes.
Speaker 1: So the idea is that this would be kind of
Speaker 1: the the airport of the future that is self sufficient,
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool idea. Still a lot of big problems,
Speaker 1: big big challenges, big questions like what is what is
Speaker 1: the ecological impact of such a thing if you were
Speaker 1: to build it. Uh, sure, it's it's generating power in
Speaker 1: a in a green way, but is it it's self
Speaker 1: green or would it be causing more harm just through
Speaker 1: its presence in the ocean. Furthermore, this sounds not unambitious.
Speaker 1: How are you going to pay for this? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he was actually already in the process of raising money
Speaker 1: for a thing he didn't have clearance to build, but
Speaker 1: it was. He figured it would be about twenty billion
Speaker 1: dollars to to build this thing. Uh, to me, that
Speaker 1: seems a little low, honestly for a four story floating
Speaker 1: airport that has two runways, twenty billion seems like it
Speaker 1: might actually be a little on the conservative side. But
Speaker 1: according to some estimates, San Diego could lose out on
Speaker 1: as much as a hundred billion dollars in economic growth
Speaker 1: if it doesn't expand its airport by So if it
Speaker 1: cost twenty billion dollars and you argue, hey, we're gonna
Speaker 1: be out a hundred billion if we don't build something
Speaker 1: technically making dollars, yeah, you're you're or you're at least
Speaker 1: saving yourself from an eighty billion dollar loss, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: if in fact all of those things are true, that's
Speaker 1: a big if. The plan, not surprisingly, was met with
Speaker 1: a lot of opposition. One of the biggest problems is
Speaker 1: that there's no regulatory agency for very large floating structures.
Speaker 1: There's there's no law or agency to to deal with that.
Speaker 1: You don't know who to ask permission, right exactly, Like
Speaker 1: like there's not a light. You go to the license
Speaker 1: office and there's not a window for very large floating structures.
Speaker 1: So you're kind of stuck. And uh. As of two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen, at least England still working to get permission
Speaker 1: to build and operate what was then being called the Oplex. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I you know, I don't name them. I just report
Speaker 1: on them. But yeah, I don't know if it's still
Speaker 1: like a living proposal that's being pushed in San Diego.
Speaker 1: If we have any fans in San Diego who are
Speaker 1: aware of this, I welcome you to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us and let us know. All. The most recent
Speaker 1: stuff I could find was from a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: so I don't know so it so it may have
Speaker 1: gone belly up, Yes, it might have been beached. This
Speaker 1: this one, more than even any of that, just reminds
Speaker 1: me too much of water World, honestly, Like, for some reasons,
Speaker 1: something about it reminds me of water World. To be fair,
Speaker 1: the desalination was for seawater and not for pe Well,
Speaker 1: how I mean, can you pe in the sea water?
Speaker 1: I mean I have Will the station suspend people in
Speaker 1: cages over brine pits? Almost certainly? So? At any rate,
Speaker 1: this was this was one of those things that that
Speaker 1: when I saw it, I was like, I can't believe
Speaker 1: I've never heard of this. I mean, granted, I live
Speaker 1: on the other side of the United States, so it's
Speaker 1: not like it's an issue that is in the forefront
Speaker 1: of my mind. Have you ever flown into San Diego? Yes,
Speaker 1: a couple of times. It is an exciting flight out
Speaker 1: let me tell you, because you fly out over the ocean,
Speaker 1: and when you're flying in, you're coming in over the ocean.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of terrifying because because you don't you
Speaker 1: don't land on the on the land side of it.
Speaker 1: You actually go out over the Pacific, turn back around,
Speaker 1: and then land on the on the landing strip. At
Speaker 1: least from memory, that's the way it is. I've flown
Speaker 1: in on the West Coast several times at several different airports,
Speaker 1: so I might be mixing this up. But as I recall,
Speaker 1: it was pretty It was a pretty steep takeoff as well,
Speaker 1: I think for noise pollution purposes. Um, but yeah, I've
Speaker 1: flown in and out of San Diego a couple of times.
Speaker 1: It's lovely sitting by the way. I highly recommend visiting.
Speaker 1: It's one of my favorites in California. Fantastic, oh Man.
Speaker 1: Mexican food in San Diego is amazing, phenomenal. But moving
Speaker 1: on to more floating airports, there's also been a couple
Speaker 1: of high profile proposals in good old London, so the
Speaker 1: Mexican food is probably not as good it is awful.
Speaker 1: I have had Mexican food in London and it is
Speaker 1: possibly the worst Mexican food I've ever had. It was
Speaker 1: also entertaining because I don't know if you know this.
Speaker 1: The people, the Brits, they like they like spicy, spicy, spicy,
Speaker 1: melt your face off Indian food, right, which actually it's really,
Speaker 1: to be fair, it's more like British colonial food, but
Speaker 1: they love that. Yet their Mexican food was the most
Speaker 1: bland Mexican food I've ever had. I couldn't understand it
Speaker 1: at any rate. Another issue they have, besides a lack
Speaker 1: of excellent Mexican restaurants in London, is that probably not
Speaker 1: there's no shortage of pigs there, but Uh, Heathrow Airport
Speaker 1: is really over text, I mean big time soonuper busy
Speaker 1: airport definitely, and it's also enormous. It is not laid
Speaker 1: out in a very easy way. You have to take
Speaker 1: different trains, Like if you land at terminal four and
Speaker 1: you need to get the terminal two, you're gonna be
Speaker 1: taking a couple of trains um to get there or
Speaker 1: a bus. It's not it's not a simple layout and
Speaker 1: there's not a whole lot of room for expansion. Although
Speaker 1: Heathrow has petitioned to build another runway, it is not
Speaker 1: met with a lot of success, met with a lot
Speaker 1: of resistance because it's already kind of an issue with
Speaker 1: residents about you know, noise pollution, the same reasons we've
Speaker 1: talked about already. So there's been a couple of proposals
Speaker 1: for an alternative airport. In one case what would be
Speaker 1: a supplemental airport, in another case what would be a
Speaker 1: complete placement for Heathrow, both of which have shared the
Speaker 1: same name. The first proposal was officially called the London
Speaker 1: Britannia Airport and it had the political backing of then
Speaker 1: London Mayor Boris Johnson. Oh boy, howdy has here, especially
Speaker 1: like the day we record this is just after he
Speaker 1: has been named the UK Foreign Secretary, in the wake
Speaker 1: of the UK leaving the European Union or announcing his
Speaker 1: intention to leave the European un and a great number
Speaker 1: of politicians leaving office. Yes, Theresa May, the now new
Speaker 1: Prime Minister of the UK, came in and cleaned house.
Speaker 1: A couple of people resigned, a couple of people were sacked,
Speaker 1: and Boris Johnson was given the role of Foreign Secretary
Speaker 1: and lots of jokes followed. Boris Johnson has not always
Speaker 1: been known as being the most diplomatic of diplomats, and
Speaker 1: yet now he has a diplomatic job. I'll tell you
Speaker 1: more about Boris Johnson and after we're done with this episode.
Speaker 1: So at any rate, he had he threw a lot
Speaker 1: of support in for this idea of the the London
Speaker 1: Britannia Airport, so much so that the locals began to
Speaker 1: refer it to it as Boris Island. It was gonna
Speaker 1: be this, uh, this airport built out on the estuary
Speaker 1: of the Thames where the Thames meets the North Sea,
Speaker 1: and the original one was going to be I think
Speaker 1: thirty miles outside of London and was just gonna be
Speaker 1: um a relatively modest airport compared to the more recent proposal.
Speaker 1: It was going to be a four runway airport. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One thing I found interesting, just as a side note,
Speaker 1: is that the architecture firm behind this proposal for the
Speaker 1: London Britannia Airport was actually Ginsler, who was the same
Speaker 1: firm that designed the Shanghai tower that we talked about
Speaker 1: in our episode about skyscrapers in vertical cities. Yeah. That's
Speaker 1: so there's sort of like they seem out there in
Speaker 1: forward looking designs, right, if you want to get some
Speaker 1: something that is uh, kind of taking the risky approach,
Speaker 1: then uh, Ginsler seems to be like the name in
Speaker 1: some of those really you know, futuristic looking and sounding designs.
Speaker 1: So this one was formally rejected in two thousand and fourteen. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so it's it's kind of, I guess dead in
Speaker 1: the water. But it was replaced by an even weirder plan, Yeah,
Speaker 1: which which emerged in two thousand thirteen. So the two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen proposal comes out the Airport Commission says no
Speaker 1: to the previous version, the four runway version, and this
Speaker 1: one also called the London Britannia Airport, so no confusion there,
Speaker 1: uh is a six runway airport, so even larger than
Speaker 1: the previously announced proposal, but it would be built built
Speaker 1: a bit further out in the estuary, fifty miles out
Speaker 1: site of London, and it actually originally there were two
Speaker 1: different plans. The first plan was the idea of a
Speaker 1: real floating airport, but eventually they deemed that that was
Speaker 1: impractical because the waters of the estuary are relatively shallow
Speaker 1: and it would only really work in deeper water. So
Speaker 1: instead they're talking about essentially building an artificial island and
Speaker 1: putting the airport on top of it. So yes, and
Speaker 1: what wouldn't technically be a floating airport anymore, be an
Speaker 1: airport that's out on the water, but it would be
Speaker 1: like on its own little island. Um estimated costs are
Speaker 1: somewhere around sixty billion dollars or more for this project.
Speaker 1: Now they would connect the airport to the mainland through
Speaker 1: a bridge for vehicle traffic, as well as an underwater
Speaker 1: light rail system to go back to London. And since
Speaker 1: it's fifty miles would be a bit of a trek
Speaker 1: if you landed there, and this would be an actual
Speaker 1: replacement for Heathrow. It's not. This would be like Heathrow
Speaker 1: would be shut down and reclaimed by the city, turned
Speaker 1: into something else, and this would become London's new primary airport.
Speaker 1: You still have Gatwick, I imagine, but yeah, kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: Um and the you know, the fact that Heathrow is
Speaker 1: considered to be the worst airport in terms of noise
Speaker 1: pollution in all of Europe means that there's at least
Speaker 1: some support for an airport that would be out over
Speaker 1: the water where that noise pollution wouldn't be bothering the
Speaker 1: residents and it would presumably improve the quality of life
Speaker 1: for a significant number of people living in London. Uh
Speaker 1: So there's that argument. But a lot of people have
Speaker 1: said this is dependent upon a lot of factors that
Speaker 1: we can't be certain of, and we suspect that the
Speaker 1: bare minimum cost is going to be sixty billion dollars.
Speaker 1: It may very well be that it balloons out of
Speaker 1: control once these other factors turn out to be stuff
Speaker 1: we didn't anticipate, like getting a nice stable base for
Speaker 1: the airport takes a lot more work than they had
Speaker 1: thought it would. That's a possibility um, and of course
Speaker 1: we also have a lot more opposition, not just political opposition.
Speaker 1: Heathrow clearly opposes the idea. They're like, no, we don't
Speaker 1: like the idea of being replaced. Please stop, give us
Speaker 1: another runway and stop talking about floating airports. And environmental
Speaker 1: agencies have also raised a lot of concerns the World
Speaker 1: Wildlife Fund to protect all of that precious life in
Speaker 1: the Thames Estuary. Well, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to
Speaker 1: sound dismissive. Right, Well, you know, it's I don't know
Speaker 1: how rich and varied and bio diverse the life in
Speaker 1: the estuary is, but I figure it would be less
Speaker 1: so with a giant airpot. Yeah, I'm sure it is
Speaker 1: worth protecting. So, um, sorry for my jokes at the
Speaker 1: expense of the bountiest nature of the Thames. Brian shrimp
Speaker 1: living inside the Thames Estuary. Uh, yeah, so that we
Speaker 1: may never see this come to pass. But again we're
Speaker 1: getting into that real problem of these major cities having
Speaker 1: real issues at hitting capacity for their their airports, and
Speaker 1: there's a need for more service, but there's a limit
Speaker 1: on the options. So it may come to be that
Speaker 1: within a decade or so that floating airports in a
Speaker 1: few areas are a thing because there's they're the best
Speaker 1: of all the available options that are out there. Or
Speaker 1: maybe we'll see a switch to other types of fast
Speaker 1: travel that are not air travel and that will reduce
Speaker 1: our reliance upon air travel. So let's say the hyper
Speaker 1: loop becomes a more um realistic option, then you could
Speaker 1: see that at least for certain types of travel, like
Speaker 1: domestic travel or travel between countries that are very close together,
Speaker 1: it might not be as frequent high power ballistic passenger capsules.
Speaker 1: You mean shooting people out of a cannon. Maybe. Okay,
Speaker 1: well I have one last one to talk about. This
Speaker 1: one is a little bit of a cheat because it's
Speaker 1: not a runway that's floating. It's a terminal that's floating.
Speaker 1: So it's it's the place where people go to gather
Speaker 1: before and after they're on a plane, not the place
Speaker 1: where planes take off and land. But still kind of cool.
Speaker 1: So back in two thousand fourteen, the Akhmad Yanni International
Speaker 1: Airport and Indonesia broke ground on an expansion that will
Speaker 1: include a floating terminal. Uh So, if it can operate safely,
Speaker 1: that might also give some credence to other people who
Speaker 1: want to try and pursue similar projects to expand or
Speaker 1: replace airports in other cities. But if if it doesn't
Speaker 1: include the runway, floating terminal doesn't seem all that inherently
Speaker 1: different than a boat, like a cruise ship or something.
Speaker 1: And I actually like this idea like that, like this
Speaker 1: is the idea out of all of this that kind
Speaker 1: of excites me because I'm like, well, if we can
Speaker 1: have floating buildings to augment our city escapes, that's that's rad.
Speaker 1: Like that, that's pretty okay, especially if if you are
Speaker 1: if it's acceptable to walk in and have like an
Speaker 1: old sea dog style accent whenever you walk into the building,
Speaker 1: We're all into this. Yeah, you know you instead of
Speaker 1: ringing a doorbell and saying, hey, how are you be?
Speaker 1: Permission to come up bar? Permission granted, and then you
Speaker 1: eat you eat sea biscuits and get food, get scurvy. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it's not all wine and roses, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's got a it's got its own panache. Right at
Speaker 1: any rate, this was one of those ideas that when
Speaker 1: I saw the article on CNN, I thought, I don't
Speaker 1: I don't know how I've never heard of any of
Speaker 1: this because I love the retrofuturism of the popular Mechanics piece.
Speaker 1: I think that the proposals, while I still have lots
Speaker 1: of questions about them, are are interesting. I don't necessarily
Speaker 1: think that they are all realistic or pragmatic, but I
Speaker 1: love the creative thought that goes into trying to solve
Speaker 1: a very difficult, very real problem. UM don't know that
Speaker 1: it's the right solution, but you know, it's it's a
Speaker 1: definitely a creative one. Yeah. I mean, it's another one
Speaker 1: of those things that airports are one of the uglier
Speaker 1: parts of what we do. And I don't mean, like
Speaker 1: morally uglier, but it's just kind of like that. They're
Speaker 1: they're not one of the most pleasant artifacts of human civilization,
Speaker 1: yet they're so incredibly necessary for the world to function
Speaker 1: as it does. What's the nicest airport you've ever flown into?
Speaker 1: Because my answer might surprise you, Uh nicest, I did, like.
Speaker 1: I like the Keflavik Airport in Iceland. It was it
Speaker 1: was just it was nice. It was quite cool. You know. Uh,
Speaker 1: why about you, Lauren, I'm very fond of Atlanta's airports.
Speaker 1: Airport's not bad, it's it's really I feel like it's
Speaker 1: well organized relatively for an airport. You know, it's relatively
Speaker 1: easy to understand where you need to go, even if
Speaker 1: it takes a heck of a lot of walking to
Speaker 1: get there. Right. Uh, there, there's one in the in
Speaker 1: the Midwest, somewhere, either Detroit or Chicago. I want to
Speaker 1: say that Troit a lovely like light tunnel that you
Speaker 1: travel through. It's like being in like Willy Wonka's a
Speaker 1: tunnel of terror, but better. Detroit is my favorite airport. Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe this is the one that I'm thinking of. They
Speaker 1: have like super fancy, futuristic looking bars there where it's like,
Speaker 1: like the architecture is amazing. They have a have a
Speaker 1: light rail that takes you from one end of the
Speaker 1: terminal to the other. That is what I'm thinking of.
Speaker 1: Detroit is that's a great airport. Surprisingly, it surprised me
Speaker 1: because I had never been to Detroit before, and I
Speaker 1: had all the stereotypical prejudice about Detroit. Went to the airport,
Speaker 1: thought this is the best airport I've been in. The
Speaker 1: second best, uh is not because the amenities, but just
Speaker 1: because of the charm, would be Kna, Hawaii, because it's
Speaker 1: all outdoors. You land, you walk, you walk down a
Speaker 1: set of stairs from your airplane to the tarmac, and
Speaker 1: you walk right and it's all like the thatched roof
Speaker 1: kind of little pavilions that you walk into. So it's
Speaker 1: all outside. If the weather is nice, it's lovely. Although
Speaker 1: the last time I flew out it was pouring down rain. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, who knows. Maybe in the future will
Speaker 1: say the nicest airport I've ever been in was off
Speaker 1: the coast of such and such. That'd be kind of cool.
Speaker 1: Uh So, guys, if you have any questions, queries you have,
Speaker 1: you've got some comments about this concept, maybe again, if
Speaker 1: you're in San Diego and you know more about the
Speaker 1: current status of that proposal, right us, let us know
Speaker 1: what you think. Our email addresses FW thinking at how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com, or you can always drop us
Speaker 1: a line on social media. On Twitter, we are FW thinking.
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Speaker 1: We look forward to hearing from you and talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. For more on this topic in
Speaker 1: the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot com. Brought
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