[Sdpg] Airports and cities: Can they coexist

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

Airports and cities: Can they coexist? 
http://www.sdearthtimes.com/et0901/et0901s2.html

As highspeed global commerce expands, and demand for air transport 
explodes, airports and cities are invading eachother's space in 
increasingly hazardous ways. The conventional response is simply to keep 
expanding airport capacity. But more imaginative solutions are now needed.

by Ed Ayres


<../Big_GIF_Caps/S_36pt.gif> ome people think the world is flat” says the 
voice on the phone a voice I have listened to many times in the past year.

     At first I hear this as a comment on myopic worldviews, but then I 
realize it's not just a figure of speech. The man I'm listening to, Jim 
Starry, is being droll. He really is talking about geometry. But he's not 
referring to sailors who once worried that their ships might sail off the 
world's edge. He's ruminating about the people who build airports. Their 
runways are flat, and to Starry, a Colorado-based ecological designer, this 
doesn't make sense. A flat runway forces the 425-ton jet that is landing on 
it to throw its engines into reverse and burn a huge amount of fuel to come 
to a stop, he says. Imagine, instead, a landing strip that is slightly 
inclined so that as the plane touches down it decelerates by rolling up a 
2- to 3-percent grade.

     Imagine that the plane, too, has been given a couple of key design 
changes. First, just before touchdown, a set of electric motors begins 
pre-rotating the wheels so that when the plane lands it won't encounter the 
huge, rubber-pulverizing friction that occurs when a motionless wheel hits 
pavement at 130 miles per hour. Then, as wing lift is transformed to wheel 
load, these electric motors begin functioning as generators, using the 
forward momentum of the plane the way a hydroelectric plant uses a river 
current. By tapping the energy of the plane's momentum, they slow the plane 
without any further reliance on fuel to produce reverse thrust and recharge 
the batteries that will later power them as motors at takeoff. As the plane 
rolls up the incline, the gravity-assisted braking brings it to a halt 
directly atop a 3-kilometer-long, multistory terminal. Unlike a 
conventional landing, which typically ends at a place that necessitates a 
10-minute, jet-powered crawl to a distant gate, this plane needs only to 
roll under battery power for a half-minute or so to a gate where its 
passengers can alight directly into the building below. When it's time to 
depart, the plane heads back down the other side of the incline, relying 
initially on its electric motors for acceleration, then switching on its 
turbines as the slope gently rounds to a level stretch for liftoff.

     Supposing such changes are technically feasible, what would be 
achieved? First, if the plane is a typical Boeing 747, about 4,000 
kilograms less jet fuel would be burned for each landing and takeoff 
roughly 300 gallons of fuel for deceleration, 300 for takeoff, and 300-plus 
for all the taxiing around large expanses of tarmac in between. (Building 
the runway like an elongated highway overpass, with the terminal underneath 
it, would eliminate miles of taxiways and cut down on the airport's use of 
land, as well as of fuel.) This adds up quickly, because a typical major 
airport accommodates around 1,000 flights a day meaning a potential daily 
savings of close to 1 million gallons of fuel from that airport alone. 
There would also be a substantial reduction of noise, which has become a 
cause of rising tensions as growing cities and their airports become jammed 
closer and closer together in the same space.

     These differences could turn out to be critical, because airports 
often celebrated for their futuristic architecture and technology have 
turned out to be surprisingly damaging in their effects on human and 
ecological health. And, in the past few years, their impacts have taken a 
turn for the worse. In the first two minutes after a 747 takes off, it 
emits as much air pollution as 3,000 cars, says a study by the Natural 
Resources Defense Council (NRDC). People living or working near airports 
have been found to suffer sharply increased rates of psychological 
impairment, degenerative illness, and mortality. Hundreds of grass-roots 
groups now say it's time to rethink the way we let these giant machines 
roar in and out of our populated areas.
<Runway.jpg>

Could slightly inclined runways ­ uphill for landing, downhill for takeoff 
­ save fuel and reduce emissions? Jim Starry’s runways would pass over the 
terminal and facilities, like a long highway overpass, also reducing the 
distance planes have to taxi. The airport would require far less land than 
in conventional designs.


An obsolescent mindset


     Jim Starry isn't just talking about a new kind of runway. To him, the 
whole mindset that has created the modern major-hub airport doesn't make 
sense. It's a mindset based on an almost never-questioned assumption that 
the solution to rapidly increasing demand for air travel is to provide an 
ever-increasing supply of land, fuel, and air space. As a result, in its 
total impact on climate, ecology, and health, today's mega-airport may be 
one of the most ill-conceived forms of large-scale infrastructure humankind 
has ever devised yet it is also one of the least accountable.

     Moreover, airports are both multiplying and expanding at a 
breathtaking rate. In the past few years, huge new airports have appeared 
all over the world from Denver to Abu Dhabi to Bangkok. Constructing such 
an airport is not on the same scale as building a new office tower or 
highway; it's more like building a city. In China, 18 new airports are 
under construction and another 21 will have been built by 2005. In Mexico, 
20 new airports are planned just for the Baja peninsula. Major airport 
expansions, which in some respects create even more urban strains than new 
“green fields” airports carved out of virgin land, are underway in hundreds 
of cities or suburbs. In the United States alone, the recently enacted 
Airport Reform and Investment Act for the 21st Century (socalled AIR-21) 
will subsidize runway expansions or additions at 2,000 airports. New York's 
heavily congested La Guardia, for example, will increase its capacity by 
600 flights per day. In much of Asia, the pressure to expand is even 
greater. By 1998, Manila's Ninoy Aquino Airport was operating at twice the 
capacity it was designed for, and Taipei's Kaohsiung Airport at more than 
three times capacity. Several Pacific Rim governments have embarked on a 
kind of airport arms race, as they attempt not only to accommodate 
skyrocketing traffic, but to establish their respective claims to having 
the preeminent “hub” airport of the region.

     As Starry ruminates, I become conscious of a distinction I hadn't much 
thought about before: the difference between air travel and airports. Over 
the past decade or so, air transport has been increasingly recognized as an 
environmental threat. It accounts for an estimated 13 percent of the 
world's carbon dioxide emissions from all transportation sources, and its 
emissions of this primary greenhouse gas are expected to grow sharply in 
the years ahead. Moreover, carbon dioxide, combined with other exhaust 
gases and particulates emitted from jet engines, could have two to four 
times as great an impact on the atmosphere as CO2 emissions alone, says a 
recent US government study. Jet contrails have also been implicated in the 
development of enormous heat-trapping clouds, which may be escalating the 
planes' impacts on climate. The exhaust from a single plane may spread to 
cover as much as 34,000 square kilometers (13,000 square miles). For each 
passenger on a trans-Pacific flight, about a ton of CO2 is added to the 
earth's atmosphere. By 2050, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change (IPCC), the contribution by contrails may be almost twice as large 
as the contribution from aircraft CO2.

     But Jim Starry notes that jets are at their worst, by far, when they 
are on the ground landing, idling, getting de-iced, taxiing, or taking off. 
Because airports are designed as they are, most airplanes spend a large 
part of their working life doing those things. At Denver International, for 
example, up to 23 planes may be running at “high idle” simultaneously, 
waiting for takeoff, and some wait up to 40 minutes. In the air, planes 
produce all that CO2 because they're burning fuel so prodigiously. On the 
ground, jet engines operate at extremely poor efficiency and the fuel is 
burned very incompletely. Instead of being converted to energy, vapor, and 
carbon dioxide, huge amounts of fuel are blown into the ground-level air in 
the form of carbon particulates and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). 
Starry thinks airports could be designed so that the bulk of that 
low-efficiency combustion and pollution is eliminated.

     When he first suggested this, I was reflexively skeptical. To begin 
with, Starry didn't have the credentials one would like to see from someone 
who's about to challenge a dominant system. He's always been an outsider a 
pilot who has flown thousands of hours, to be sure, and a technician who 
did some inventive work designing high-attitude balloon launching devices 
for the National Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric 
Research (NCAR). But Starry has never been a prominent player in the world 
of aeronautic or architectural engineering. It took me a while to decide 
that this aptly named man might not be just another of those hyper-educated 
dreamers who live in the twilight between technology and society, trying 
haplessly to provide world-changing solutions. Eventually, though, I 
realized he might be on to something I'd been largely oblivious to. When 
I'm in an airport, I'm in a kind of twilight zone of my own, my thoughts 
dwelling on either the place I'm coming from or the place I'm going to. The 
airport itself doesn't seem quite real. But as I listen to Starry, my focus 
shifts.
<Runway2.jpg>

The building under the runways could be several kilometers long, rising as 
high as eight or ten stories at the center where the terminal gates are 
located. Radiated heat from the building would warm the runway in winter, 
improving safety and reducing the use of de-icing chemicals that pollute 
groundwater.

<Runway3.jpg>

Starry’s idea for an efficient runway includes a slightly convex shape from 
side to side ­ helping both to center the plane as it lands and to protect 
it from crosswinds. The runway might be wider at the beginning, then narrow 
gradually as it approaches the terminal stop.


Pollution in high places


     Starry tells me about Denver International Airport (DIA) a subject he 
returns to again and again in our conversations. When the site was being 
prepared in the early 1990s, the amount of soil bulldozed off the prairie 
could have filled a building 10 feet high, 20 feet wide, and 3,000 miles 
long. The ostensible reason for constructing DIA was to replace Denver's 
Stapleton Airport, where air traffic was projected to explode from around 
35 million passengers in 1985 to 100 million in the early 21st century. 
During the five years after this rationale was first offered, Stapleton's 
traffic declined by 5 million passengers, but the new airport was built 
anyway. Today, instead of driving 11 kilometers (7 miles) from downtown 
Denver to Stapleton, people drive 57 kilometers (32 miles) to DIA. Denver 
officials estimated that the amount of air pollution generated by the new 
airport and its added traffic was six to eight times what had been 
generated before. And this project was not unique. What happened in 
Colorado is now beginning to happen all over the world. Seoul's new Incheon 
Airport is about 60 kilometers from downtown, as are the two international 
airports outside Buenos Aires. Kuala Lumpur International is 66 kilometers out.

     Watching the building of DIA got Jim Starry to thinking more seriously 
about the old assumption that the only satisfaction for fast-rising demand 
is a rising supply. He saw manifestations of this assumption on several 
fronts of our globalizing economy. In the energy industry, the impulse is 
to drill for more oil, rather than to use existing supplies much more 
efficiently. In waste management, the impulse is to find more space to 
dump. In housing, it's to develop more land, rather than design for higher 
density on the land already claimed for human use. All these impulses are 
vestiges of pioneer times, when it was always possible to find more 
resources by moving on, opening up new territory.

     Airports epitomize all three of these resource fronts: they consume 
land, energy, and dumping capacity at rates rarely equaled anywhere else. 
Denver is a telling case, because as one of the world's newest 
mega-airports, it was supposed to be among the most efficient. But instead, 
DIA seems to have set new standards for excessive consumption. It covers 
138 square kilometers (53 square miles), which makes it twice the size of 
New York City's Manhattan Island. It has greatly increased the region's 
overall oil consumption; it has increased the time and money travelers 
spend, even before they get on their planes (it has one of the worst 
on-time records in the nation); and it has accelerated Denver's spread over 
the Colorado prairie.

     As Starry speaks, I'm well aware that this is the kind of thing many 
people don't like to hear. I'm listening because it's my job to try to keep 
track of such things. But I'm acutely conscious that we environmentalists 
have failed, so far, in our mission to halt the accelerating degradation of 
the planet. In the 30 years since the first Earth Day, every major trend 
has worsened on a global level. And now I'm hearing about something we have 
never paid much attention to, because it hasn't fallen into our 
conventional environmental categories. We study cities and suburbs, 
agricultural land and wildlife habitat. But airports aren't really any of 
these. We study green building techniques, but those techniques usually 
focus on houses and hotels and office buildings, not airports. We've 
studied the contribution of jet aircraft to air pollution as a function of 
miles traveled, but not as a result of landing and idling and taking off. 
Yet, we know these ground-level effects are substantial. Gar Smith, of the 
Earth Island Institute, reports that, in the first five minutes of flight, 
a commercial airliner burns (turns to CO2) as much oxygen as 17,000 
hectares (44,000 acres) of forest produce in a day.

     But even more significant than what the plane burns is what it 
poisons. Studies of neighborhoods near airports such as Chicago's O'Hare 
and Seattle's Sea-Tac have shown that jet exhaust is subjecting residents 
to extremely high concentrations of the carcinogens benzene, formaldehyde, 
1,3-butadiene, and at least 200 other toxic compounds. According to Jack 
Saporito, president of the Chicago-based US Citizens Aviation Watch, these 
studies also indicate that significant increases in cancer risk are found 
among people living near airports with as few as 15 jet flights per day. 
Yet, most major cities launch hundreds, and some of them where there's more 
than one major airport launch thousands.

     Of course, many of those flights and their accompanying cargo have 
brought important benefits. They've helped bring the world together. But in 
replacing no-man's lands with busy tarmac, they've brought a new set of 
threats. For the sake of mental neatness, I divide these threats into five 
broad categories, though in truth they're not entirely separable it's a 
little like trying to separate the risks of overeating, under-exercising, 
smoking, and breathing polluted air in a man who's a 
heart-attack-waiting-to-happen.

1. Land consumption:The biggest sprawl of all


     Chicago's O'Hare Airport sits on the site of former apple orchards. 
The St. Louis airport was once soybean fields. DIA is where winter wheat 
was once grown. China's Macau International spans two ecologically 
sensitive wetlands. You'd think that as the human population expands, and 
development consumes more and more of the world's remaining open land, 
airport planners would design with increasing efficiency. Instead, as old 
airports add new runways, planners continue to use the same basic 
principles they've always used, and new airports tend to be more sprawling 
than the old. Denver's new DIA is 50 times the size of New York's old La 
Guardia, though they carry comparable traffic. The new Kuala Lumpur 
International, when finished, will be 30 times the area of the old Osaka 
Itami. Germany's new Munich Franz Josef Straus is 5 times the area of 
Norway's old Oslo Gardermoen.

     The problem is not just that these huge projects cut sharply into each 
country's declining environmental assets; they also disrupt existing 
infrastructure, which increases the pressure on the surrounding environment 
still further. The impending expansion of Lambert-St. Louis International, 
for example, will bulldoze one-fifth of the adjoining neighborhood of 
Bridgeton, wiping out 2,000 houses. If the relocation of those houses' 
residents follows recent US patterns, their new homes will take up even 
more land than the airport is taking from them, as they move farther out to 
larger, cheaper tracts.

<FigureY.gif>

2. Air pollution: Autos and airplanes


     For the moment, disregard the emissions of airplanes in flight. 
Consider just what happens at ground level. According to the US Department 
of Transportation (DOT), a Boeing 747 spends an average of 32 minutes 
landing, taxiing, and taking off. In that time, it can generate 87 
kilograms of nitrogen oxides (NOX) equivalent to over 85,000 kilometers of 
automobile emissions. In a major international airport, with 1,000 flights 
a day, that would come to 87 metric tons of NOX a day, or roughly the 
amount that might be produced by all the cars in a city of 2 or 3 million 
people. NOX, of course, is one of the principal precursors of smog.

     Of course, not all of the planes in a big airport are 747s, so actual 
NOX totals should be smaller. And indeed, a 1995 survey conducted by NRDC, 
in which US airports offered their own estimates, reported NOX emissions 
topping out at around 5 tons a day for a major airport though it should be 
noted that this figure is based only on the data from those airports that 
responded, which included fewer than half of those contacted. Still, 5 tons 
equals the NOX output of close to 5 million kilometers (about 3 million 
miles) of automobile driving, and the average number of flights handled by 
a major airport appears likely to have tripled from its 1995 level by 2010. 
As population growth and globalization continue to drive up air traffic, 
while competing demands for land continue to narrow the ground-level 
bottlenecks through which all this traffic must flow, the amount of idling 
and taxiing time is likely to grow well beyond that 32-minute average. It 
is during this idling and taxiing that fuel efficiency is poorest, so as 
traffic rises, pollution can be expected to rise even faster.

     Public knowledge of what happens to our air in airports has been 
blocked, not only by a lack of any systematic monitoring, but sometimes 
also by a lack of candor about the meaning of the few measurements that are 
made. Consider, for example, the role of particulate matter (PM) 
measurements in the approval of Denver International. When DlA was being 
designed, its particulate matter emissions were projected by using a “PM10” 
standard, which counted all the particles that are 10 microns in diameter 
or larger (a micron is one-millionth of a meter). According to Gerald Rapp, 
a chemical engineer who works as an air quality consultant, 99 percent of 
the particulates spewed out by jet engines are smaller than 10 microns, 
meaning that the actual PM output was up to 100 times worse than the 
measurements suggested. “A 10-micron particle is a boulder,” Rapp told me. 
“What's important biologically, for human health, are the really small 
ones. Tobacco smoke is a tenth to a quarter of one micron.”

     When DIA was first proposed, the city of Denver opposed it. In 1983, 
the city residents elected a new mayor, Federico Pefia, who had said he saw 
no reason why a new airport was needed. “In terms of access, convenience, 
and land-use impacts, development of a new regional airport represents an 
inferior choice,” he said. A study by the city projected that, with the 
huge increase in car driving it would bring, DIA would generate 224 tons of 
air pollution per day, including NOX, PM, unburned hydrocarbons, and carbon 
monoxide. This projection did not include carbon dioxide, since global 
warming had not yet arrived as a political issue.

     Shortly after he was elected, however, Pefia became an enthusiastic 
DIA booster. He championed the project with federal authorities, who were 
interested in supporting a model project to show how new airports could 
improve urban air quality by dissipating the pollution by moving the flight 
paths farther from cities. And the particulate projections for Denver 
neatly supported that idea. By not measuring the smaller-than-10-micron 
particles, and disregarding the emissions from the 33 million 
passenger-miles of daily airport commuting, Pefia would later be able to 
claim that his project had cleaned up the air in Denver, which in a narrow 
sense it had. But for the region as a whole, DIA made the air worse. 
Nonetheless, Pefia's claim of success helped catapult him into the job of 
US Secretary of Transportation in the Clinton administration, and DIA, in 
turn, became a model for airport building around the world.

3. Water pollution:Off the edge of the tarmac


     In the United States, little has been written about the impacts of 
airports on the surrounding land and water, in part because of the 
aforementioned “neither-here-nor-there” quality of such projects, and in 
part because only one major new urban airport (DIA) has been built in the 
United States since the enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act 
of 1969, which made environmental assessments mandatory. While a number of 
“regional” airports have been built since then, their more rural locations 
have allowed their environmental assessments to largely escape public notice.

     In the assessment for Denver International, it seems there was never 
any doubt that the project would be approved. In the 550-page book Denver 
International Airport: Lessons Learned , by Paul Stephen Dempsey 
(McGrawHill, 1997), the first reference to any environmental issue appears 
in this sentence: “By late summer 1989, the first federal funding 
installment ($60 million) was received, the FAA approved the final 
environmental impact statement , and groundbreaking on the project occurred 
on September 28, 1989.” (Italics added.) The book includes little mention 
of environmental issues involving DIA, and none at all of water pollution.

     For Jim Starry, this is a dumbfounding omission. “Look at what 
happened with de-icing,” he says. “When ice forms on planes, as happens 
often in Colorado, workers remove it with ethylene glycol. At Stapleton, 
they were using 51 million gallons a year, and most of it ran off into the 
ground.” By then, Starry had left NCAR and was running his own 
environmental design firm. When city officials invited him to present his 
design ideas for the proposed new airport, he suggested building a set of 
containment ponds to catch the ethylene glycol for recycling. The idea was 
adopted, though he was never either credited for it or paid for his 
consulting. (Bill Smith, the assistant mayor who invited him, died before 
the project got underway, and his successor seems to have pushed Starry out 
of the picture.) After the ponds were built and the airport began 
operation, however, a curious thing happened. According to Starry, one of 
the owners of a major airline company that was being heavily courted by DIA 
(none of the major carriers wanted the new airport), was also the 
contractor who had been selling ethylene glycol to Stapleton. At DIA, with 
the ponds catching the fluid for recycling, there was no need to buy so 
much of it until one day the ponds were fitted with a 3-foot-diameter pipe 
that carried the used antifreeze about two miles and dumped it into Barr Lake.

     “Now, you can fish in Barr Lake year-round, even when all the other 
lakes in Colorado are frozen,” says Starry. He pauses thoughtfully. “But 
you won't catch any fish.”

     DIA's antifreeze management, it seems, was not atypical. In the 
mid-1990s, US Citizens Aviation Watch (US-CAW) sued Baltimore-Washington 
Airport (BWI) for allowing its de-icing chemicals to enter an aquifer from 
which the people of Anne Arundel County get their drinking water. In 
Michigan, state environmental officials recently cited Wayne County for 
allowing ethylene glycol from Metro Airport to be discharged into a drain 
that empties into the Detroit River. And it's not just in de-icing country 
that airports pose threats to water quality. In Florida, Miami-Dade County 
has just filed the largest environmental lawsuit in the state's history, 
citing American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and 15 other companies for 
dumping airplane fuel, solvents, and other toxic chemicals into the ground 
around Miami International Airport, where they have seeped into the 
county's only drinking water source. But so far, the problem of airports 
leaking or dumping their multifarious fluids has remained largely below the 
radar so to speak of public scrutiny. Saporito notes that US-CAW won its 
suit against BWI, but the contamination continues. Holding tanks are still 
leaking ethylene glycol and other chemicals into the aquifer, and people in 
Maryland continue to drink it.

4. Noise: The psychological pollution


     The scream of jets of fuel igniting and turbine blades striking the 
air as planes take off has become the most noticeable of the environmental 
impacts of airports worldwide, for obvious reasons. Whereas the effects of 
contaminated air or water may take years to emerge, airplane noise produces 
instant irritation. As both cities and airports expand, more and more 
people find themselves living under the flight paths of ascending jets. 
Only in the past decade have planners begun to react. In the Netherlands, 
for example, a 1979 study found that 42,000 homes were being subjected to 
severe noise from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport; in 1990, Schiphol adopted a 
plan to reduce the impact by noise-insulating some houses and relocating 
others, and by curtailing night operations. At Paris's Orly, a night curfew 
has been imposed, and noisier aircraft are required to pay higher taxes. In 
at least a few places (Osaka, Hong Kong, Seoul), officials have mitigated 
both noise and land scarcity by filling coastal wetlands or bays so that 
flight paths go over water instead of homes.

     In the United States, where suburbanization has caused the most 
extensive friction, irritation over noise has spurred the formation of 
scores of grass-roots groups opposing airport expansion projects. In 
Seattle, a citizens' group called the Regional Commission on Airport 
Affairs has mobilized to stop the building of a third runway at Sea-Tac 
Airport, claiming that “the only plan for mitigation of noise from the new 
runway is to buy more nearby houses,” and that “this provides no relief for 
the tens of thousands who will be newly exposed to overflight noise in 
neighborhoods miles from the airport.” In California, a group called 
Citizens Against Airport Pollution (CAAP) is suing to stop expansion of San 
Jose International Airport because the project “would cause traffic 
gridlock and lead to more air and noise pollution.” Similar groups have 
formed to fight noise at New York's La Guardia, Chicago's O'Hare, Los 
Angeles International, and St. Louis's Lambert-St. Louis International, 
among others. It was a national coalition of such groups that gave rise to 
Saporito's organization, which now has 1.5 million members. “There are 
expansion plans coming up everywhere, and you just can't roll over the 
objecting communities anymore,” says Dennis McGram, who heads a national 
coalition called NOISE the National Organization to Insure a 
Sound-controlled Environment.

5. Impacts on health


     There's a NOMBYish (not over my back yard) quality to the political 
battles being fought over airports and their adjacent communities: many 
people like the commercial boost an airport can bring, and like the 
convenience of having ready access to air travel, but don't want planes 
roaring over their homes. Many of the battles have featured accusations by 
one neighborhood that it is being used as a dumping ground for noise being 
diverted from another, more politically connected and vocal neighborhood. 
“They Complain, We Get the Planes!” read one recent website headline. “How 
Our Neighbors to the North Screwed Us,” said another. In some cases the 
tug-of-war has become an environmental justice issue, with flight paths 
tending to be located over the city's poorest neighborhoods. But in the 
long run, these local concerns may be subsumed by a more pervasive one: the 
emerging realization that airports may affect the health of anyone living 
within about a 20-mile radius. In the United States today, 70 percent of 
the population lives within 20 miles of a major airport.

     As reported by Sharon Skolnick of the Earth Island Institute, the 
State of Washington's Health Department Census, which compared 1991-1995 
health data for people living near Sea-Tac Airport with those of Seattle 
residents overall, found that “infant mortality near the airport was 50 
percent greater, heart disease was 57 percent greater, cancer deaths were 
36 percent greater.” For people living near the airport, overall life 
expectancy was found to be 5.6 years shorter. That's not to say we know 
airport-generated pollution was the cause (or more likely one of several 
causes), but it suggests that far more attention to that possibility is now 
warranted. In Chicago, a similar pattern was found, as people living near 
O'Hare Airport had cancer rates 70 percent higher than those for Chicago 
overall.

     One of the newer and more alarming findings concerns the effects of 
noise. Apparently, the complaints of groups like NOISE are not just matters 
of frayed nerves or disrupted sleep. In Germany, when the new Munich 
airport went into operation, a study of third- and fourth-grade children 
living in the flight path found significant increases in blood pressure and 
stress hormones, compared with a similar group of children living in the 
same area before the airport began operation. “These hormones are linked to 
adult illnesses, some of which are life-threatening, including high blood 
pressure, elevated lipids and cholesterol, heart disease, and reduction in 
the body's supply of disease-fighting immune cells,” noted the report.

     The Munich study, conducted by the Cornell University College of Human 
Ecology, also found that the children subjected to flight-path noise did 
not learn to read as well, because they tended to tune out speech. “This is 
probably the most definitive proof that noise causes stress and is harmful 
to humans,” said Gary Evans, a professor of design and environmental 
analysis at Cornell.

The physics of catching a ball


     Listening to Jim Starry talk about ethylene glycol in Barr Lake, I 
feel a certain frustration, because I have come to empathize with the 
public reaction: “Everything causes cancer now, and everything is killing 
the environment. What can I do about it?” I sense that Starry is frustrated 
too, but not because of a lack of solutions. He has a solution that makes 
intuitive sense and is clearly worth pursuing getting funding for 
feasibility studies, and perhaps pilot projects but people aren't taking it 
seriously.

     I question him more closely about his central concept the inclined 
runway. Has the idea ever been tried?

     He laughs. “Lots of airports have runways that are inclined because 
that was just the lay of the land when they built them,” he says. 
“Telluride, Colorado has a 4-percent grade. Aspen has a 112-foot dip. Oh, 
yes a big airport in Nepal has a 15-percent incline. We've just never done 
it on purpose, taken advantage of what it could save in fuel, if we did it 
systematically.”

     How about the pilots? Do they have a problem with it?

     “No. But pilots are not allowed to have input into runway design. 
Pilots would actually find it easier, because as you land, you can see the 
whole runway ahead, like when you're driving and you see the road ahead 
going up a hill. On a flat, the heat waves often distort visibility you get 
that shimmer, and sometimes you can't see all the way down the runway.”

     He recalls the time a captain at Gurnsy airbase in Wyoming invited him 
to video a C130 landing on an incline. It went smoothly, although Starry 
was so transfixed by what he was seeing through the camera that he almost 
got run over by the plane.

     What about the terminal? I understand that having the runway pass over 
it eliminates most of the taxiing, but are there any other advantages or 
disadvantages?

     “Think again about the de-icing,” he replies. “With the whole airport 
complex built under the runways, the fuel could be kept underground, at 58 
degrees. Instead of filling the wing tanks with fuel that's been stored in 
freezing trucks, it would go into the planes warm, so the wings would 
usually have no need to be de-iced in the first place. Then think of ice on 
the runway. The heat radiating from the terminal's roof melts the ice on 
the runway overhead, which is good for safety. Then there's the energy 
conservation of a complex where all the buildings are combined into one, 
and where it's all insulated by earthen embankment. The whole airport could 
be built on one-third the land, at one-half the cost, with lower operating 
cost, and a cleaner environment which also means the airlines and other 
airportrelated businesses could operate a lot more profitably. It's like 
designing a city, really; the more compact design is more energy-efficient, 
more materials-efficient, and more pleasant to be in.”

     Starry has clearly thought this concept through, and I feel a growing 
curiosity about its implications. As an editor at Worldwatch, I've long 
been wary of technological solutions to problems caused primarily by poor 
judgement or confused values. There are the sobering lessons we've learned 
about pesticides the 1950s PR photos of kids smiling happily as they play, 
free of fear from mosquitos, in a protective cloud of DDT. There's the PR 
mail I get every week or so from Los Alamos National Laboratory, about its 
latest proposed technological fix for humankind. But Starry's proposal 
intrigues me, not because it's new technology but because it seems to be a 
more intelligent way of using techniques we humans have had all along. I 
wondered how long it has been since Homo sapiens has known how to cup his 
hand to catch a ball instead of trying to catch it with the hand held flat.

     But if his concept has real potential, why don't people listen? Starry 
is a gentle person, and doesn't like to blame. He prefers to say the 
problem is that no one is in charge of the airport system, and it turns out 
there's some truth in this. On a micro level, someone controls every 
movement the air traffic controllers directing the planes in the air, the 
security guards monitoring your luggage and your pockets. But on a macro 
level, when it comes to planning and building, there seems to be no place 
where the buck stops. In the United States, FAA guidelines tell builders to 
limit runways to a maximum slope of 1.58 percent, but no one seems to be 
able to explain why. It's like the “least common denominator” standards of 
product safety or quality in commerce, which provide a level playing field 
for all jurisdictions, but which some jurisdictions complain about because 
it may prevent them from adopting their own, higher, standards. Airplane 
pilots, wherever they may be landing, understandably like some degree of 
uniformity in runway design. And because airports are used by all nations, 
governments can't impose unilateral regulations on them to the extent they 
might on their strictly domestic operations. So airport administrations 
have become worlds unto themselves quasi-independent, and fully accountable 
to no one. I find myself wondering if this lack of accountability isn't a 
manifestation of the same mental compartmentalization that shackles so much 
of our thinking so that, for example, public health agencies enforce 
no-smoking rules in airport terminals, but have no say in runway design, 
which may account for vastly larger differences in the amounts of 
carcinogens to which people in airports are subjected. According to NCAR, 
each gallon of jet fuel burned pollutes over 8,400 gallons of air to a 
level of toxicity that would be dangerous, if not lethal, to breathe. The 
only reason we're not seeing it kill anyone is that it's so rapidly 
dispersed through the atmosphere. But how long can a finite atmosphere 
continue to absorb it?

     In any case, jet pollution isn't regulated the way car exhaust is. In 
the United States, legal loopholes have left airports exempt from either 
reporting to the Toxic Release Inventory or regulation under the Clean Air 
Act. And when US Aviation Watch sued Baltimore-Washington International for 
its contamination of drinking water, Saporito says that “EPA was so 
out-of-the-loop that they had to come to us to find out what was going on. 
That's scary.”

The boy who flew backward ... but remembered to keep looking ahead
<../ET_Com_Graph/Article_link_mid.jpg>

     Still, it seems that the biggest reason why people don't pay attention 
to the environmental damage done by large airports and to the kind of 
remedies proposed by people like Jim Starry is neither administrative 
buck-passing nor corruption. Rather, it's that blind spot about supply-side 
solutions. For most people, airport dysfunction still seems to be just a 
matter of passenger crowding and delays. Even in terms of passenger 
capacity, the usual view is narrow considering only how to expand the 
numbers of runways and flights, not how to either reduce demand or make 
supply more energy- and land-efficient.

     Two recent accounts illustrate this tunnel vision. A 2000 Consumer 
Reports review of US airports, ostensibly considering all major factors in 
consumers' interests, concludes that the solution is to build more outlying 
airports. Noting that 635 million passengers flew on US carriers in 1999, 
with a projected increase to 1 billion by 2010, the authors argue that the 
answer is “public policy that equitably provides easier access to the 
skies,” and that, as new airports are planned for locations farther and 
farther from city centers, “the increasing availability of alternative 
arrival and departure points for air travel doesn't come a moment too soon.”

     A front page article in USA Today (September 12, 2000) comes to 
essentially the same conclusion. “Can gridlock be cured by expanding 
airports?” asks the headline. And a subhead answers: “Using alternative 
sites may be a better solution.” The story goes on to suggest that the 
money being spent to add new runways to large-hub airports would be better 
invested by building more new airports in outlying areas “where land is 
cheaper and the population more welcoming.” Both publications thus echo the 
prevailing 19th-century notion that the way to get rid of any kind of 
congestion whether of people, traffic, or waste is simply to remove it to a 
more open space.

     But this is the same primrose path that led to suburban sprawl. By 
looking only at the profitability of new tracts, versus the redesign of 
cities, we missed the costs of destroying habitat, paving over farmland, 
increasing per capita energy consumption, and so on. But the proliferation 
of new runways and access roads isn't just a parallel phenomenon; it's an 
escalation of sprawl. New airports almost invariably mean major new roads 
and additional developments along those roads.

     Breaking this kind of vicious circle will require looking at 
efficiency, not just in the narrow way airlines do when they try to fly 
without empty seats, but in the broad way that considers how much energy is 
consumed by the whole system. An airport that reduces congestion on the 
runways and in the air by moving out from the city isn't necessarily more 
efficient if it requires hundreds of millions of passenger miles of added 
driving each year, as does DIA. A project that makes people use more energy 
may boost local business and add to GNP, but ecologically it moves us 
backwards.

     Jim Starry says he knows what it's like to fly backwards and it's a 
scary feeling. Here, again, he's not speaking figuratively. One time when 
he was in high school, he deliberately slowed the plane he was flying a J3 
cub that he and a friend had rebuilt to stalling speed, as part of a 
training exercise. The stalling speed of the J3 is 30 miles per hour. 
Flying into a head wind of 50 miles per hour, “I was actually flying 
backwards at 20 mph,” he recalls. “I was 18 years old what can I say?” Now 
older and more circumspect, he doesn't like the idea of unnecessary risk on 
either a personal or societal level. There are better ways to find thrills, 
and one of the best is to allow for more imaginative, more out-of-the-box 
thinking about how to solve some of the world's most threatening problems.

     Starry's solutions don't solve the problem of sprawl, but they help to 
redirect consciousness in an important way. They show that innovative 
design in runways, terminals, and airplanes can provide nondestructive 
substitutes for new jet fuel supplies or numbers of flights. In doing so, 
they may also help attune us to the idea that airport design is becoming an 
increasingly important part of the larger issue of urban design. That, in 
turn, is critical to determining how our increasingly congested and 
restless human population can adapt successfully to the limitations of its 
fast-shrinking planet. <../ET_Com_Graph/ET_EOT.gif>

     Ed Ayres is editor of WORLD WATCH and editorial director of the 
Worldwatch Institute.

     The Worldwatch Institute is dedicated to fostering an environmentally 
sustainable society in which human needs are met in ways that do not 
threaten the health of the natural environment or the prospects of future 
generations. Worldwatch Institute, 1776 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, 
D.C. 20036-1904; (202) 452-1999; email worldwatch at worldwatch.org; website 
www.worldwatch.org.


For further information

Paul Stephen Dempsey, Airport Planning and Development Handbook, 
McGraw-Hill, 1999 provides perspectives on land-use impacts of major 
airports worldwide.
Paul Stephen Dempsey, et al., Denver International Airport: Lessons 
Learned, McGraw-Hill, 1997 tells the story of the world's most severe case 
of airport sprawl.
Natural Resources Defense Council, “Flying Off Course: Environmental 
Impacts of America's Airports,” October 1996, surveys 125 of the busiest US 
airports. Contact: www.nrdc.org.
Cornell University College of Human Ecology studied impacts of airport 
noise on children's health and development in Munich, Germany. See 
Psychological Science, January 1998.
The Ozone Secretariat, United Nations Environment Programme, “Special 
Report on Aviation and the Global Atmosphere l9th OEWG,” June 1999 assesses 
current and projected impacts of aircraft emissions. See 
www.unep.org/ozone/index-en.shtml.
US Citizens Aviation Watch is a coalition of regional citizens' groups 
concerned with the noise, pollution, and land-use impacts of airport 
expansions. Contact: www.us-caw.org; or call Jack Saporito, (847) 506670