Drop The 'Concrete Solution,'
Think Things Through
Ronald E.G. Davies
Aviation Week & Space Technology
July 9th

Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher sees a solution to airport congestion in
simplistic terms: build another 50 mi. of concrete runways ( AW&ST June 4,
p. 86). While the construction industries would no doubt welcome this as a
supplement to the already bottomless crucible of cement that continues to
become concrete for extra lanes on interstate highways and parking lots,
this is not the answer.

Airports for airplanes are like highways for cars or trucks or buses. With
both, the only solution to frequency saturation is to add more track
capacity, i.e., more concrete. Unfortunately, in a transportation version of
Parkinson's Law, the result is always the same. More concrete attracts more
traffic, be it earthbound on the roads or airborne in airliners. By the time
a two-lane divided highway is completed, plans are in hand to make it four
lane. No sooner does the first incidence of gridlock paralyze traffic than a
committee is assembled to decide where next to add more lanes. And if we
follow Herb's advice, we shall be doomed to a similar fate with airport
construction in the 21st century.

The most populous metropolitan areas in the U.S. already have multiple major
airports apiece. Extra runways, even extra airports, are not going to solve
the short-term problem, much less the long-term one. By the time they are
built, they too will be saturated with additional flights to cope with the
forecast demand, unless--and this is a big unless--the average aircraft size
increases.

It makes no sense to operate 30 flights a day with 150-seat aircraft, when
15 a day with 300-seaters would be adequate. Dare I suggest even that seven
a day with 600-seaters, carefully scheduled, would be even better? Japan is
close to this last solution already, with the operation of 530-seat Boeing
747s on its trunk air routes.

Airlines claim their obsession with frequency and hubs responds to public
demand. Wrong. But passengers do not demand rush-hour congestion at the
hubs. Passengers ask for no more than adequate capacity at the times they
wish to travel, mostly early mornings or early evenings. Most of the midday
traffic is at the hubs. All that traffic at Atlanta is not because people
are going to Atlanta; it is because they are going through Atlanta.

What about another solution? The national prejudice against passenger
railroads in the U.S. is almost inexplicable. Americans insist on crawling
from one gridlock to another in their cars. Japan and Europe, meanwhile,
have moved into the 21st century with high-speed rail: the bullet train and
the TGV, respectively. These are more than just fast trains. They constitute
a new form of transport, as far advanced over U.S. railroads as the jet
airliner is over the DC-3. The key to this technological breakthrough was in
the track. Simply build it straight and level. The advantage is not just
speed. The rail track (even the old meandering kind) allows additional
capacity simply by adding more coaches to the trains or operating more
trains along the same track. No need to clad more square miles of real
estate with concrete every few years.

With five highly successful airliners in production, Boeing seems unwilling
to face the future, except with a highly speculative Sonic Cruiser. Its
published forecasts only go up to the year 2010. Airbus has done its
homework. The A380 is tailor-made for the enormous capacity demand that will
have to be supplied for intercontinental and transcontinental routes in the
decades to follow.

The much-peddled case for dispersed traffic patterns is largely a myth. To
take an example, New York traffic certainly could be dispersed to gateways
at Hartford, Albany or Philadelphia (with high-speed rail, even to
Washington or Boston). But where is it going? Not to dispersed destinations
such as Bordeaux, Bristol or Bremen, but to London, Paris, Amsterdam,
Frankfurt and Rome. Relieving the problem at one end only exacerbates the
problem at the other end.

The Europeans are well on their way to solving their problem by coordinating
air and rail services with intermodal transfer convenience, progressively
transferring heavy short-haul air traffic to high-speed rail and planning to
introduce large aircraft to cope with the heavy demands of long-haul routes.
In contrast, we in the U.S. are diverted with that old chestnut: more speed,
in spite of the lessons of the Convair 990 and Concorde. And we are further
persuaded that the answer to congestion is to obliterate the countryside
with more and more concrete. We have just not thought the problem through.


Ronald E.G. Davies is curator of the Aeronautics Div. of the Smithsonian
Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, a fellow of the
Royal Aeronautical Society and an associate of the Academie Nationale de
l'Air et de l'Espace.
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