Airports at Sea

As Flight 452 from Paris circles New York International Airport, passengers look down to see a grid of runways six miles long floating in the open Atlantic 35 miles seaward of Sandy Hook. Wind speed at sea level is 40 m.p.h. and the swells are 6 ft. high, but inside a protective barrier of huge plastic bags the water surrounding the airport is calm. An immense pipe, dropping into the ocean from one end of the airport, is actually a pneumatic subway tube carrying passengers and freight to shore . . .

2001 A.D.? No, it is 1980, or sooner, as conceived by two bright New York architects, Charles Gallichio II and Jan Andrzej Dabrowski. Their dream airport is merely one of the more imaginative of a number of new proposals for airports located at sea or in other large bodies of water. There is nothing dreamy about the impetus be hind the proposals. Land-based airports are already jammed with traffic, and real estate for new ones is scarce and expensive. Even when sufficient open space can be found, local citizens are sure to mount powerful objections to the noise, danger and air pollution of a major modern airport. "A properly located ocean airport," say Gallichio and Dabrowski, "needn't interfere with flight patterns of existing airports or with irreplaceable conservation and recreation areas. It costs nothing to acquire the site, and the airport has unlimited room to expand as traffic increases."

Dike Protection. Not everyone believes that such an airport would work.

The skepticism, however, involves only the idea of floating; otherwise, there is little question that many jetports of the future will be water-based. This fall the FAA expects to unwrap a $35,000 study of existing proposals for offshore air port construction, which will include airports built on fill, on piles and behind dikes. Meanwhile, a number of cities in the U.S. and abroad have their own study projects under way.

Cleveland is seriously considering a $1.2 billion Lake Erie jetport built on 1,050 acres of landfill and protected by breakwaters, dikes and cofferdams. Although it would lie a mile offshore, a ten-lane causeway with provision for public transit would link it with the city's center, and feeder airlines would connect with cities as far away as Toronto.

Proposals for Chicago's badly needed third jetport include a floating airport constructed of aluminum modules and reached by helibus and Hovercraft. Architect Stanley Tigerman estimates it would cost a relatively modest $500 million. Closer to approval, however, is a $1 billion dike-protected jetport 35 ft. to 55 ft. below the water level of Lake Michigan and connected to the Loop by six miles of causeway, tunnel and bridge. Says Chicago's Aviation Commissioner William Downes Jr.: "The main objection comes from the save-our-lakefront fraternity who don't realize that an airport six miles out wouldn't be visible from the shore except as a large shadow from high buildings."

Concrete Island. The most promising solution to New Orleans' problems is a proposed $350 million supersonic jetport to be built above the shallow waters of Lake Pontchartrain on concrete pilings. One drawback is that its flight patterns would overlap those of the present lakefront jetport. Existing flight patterns also crowd New York planners. Engineer James J. Currey Sr. suggests rearranging them to make room for a new pile-supported jetport in the shallows behind Sandy Hook. Space Planner Lawrence Lerner would create new landing space by (in effect) moving a greatly enlarged J.F.K. Airport onto a nine-mile-long concrete island five miles off Long Beach and looping existing land transportation right through it, with parking garages and rapid-transit stops near every plane-departure lounge.

Lerner estimates that more than two-thirds of the $6 billion needed for his offshore jetport could be raised by the sale and development of the old J.F.K. Airport on Jamaica Bay. Chicago and New Orleans may finance theirs by charging passenger-use fees similar to those collected by many European airports. Any offshore airport, however, needs site and feasibility studies before construction can begin, and the task of draining or filling the enormous areas required is herculean. The proposed Lake Erie jetport would take an estimated ten years to complete, the New Orleans jetport nine, and even Chicago's optimistic Commissioner Downes figures on a minimum of four to five years for his Lake Michigan airport. Meanwhile air transportation is rapidly strangling on its own success, and costs, unlike planes, keep going up but never come down.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.