Originally Posted by
Ian W
Interesting that nobody has noted that the real problem is the design of the airport terminals that require all aircraft to cross active runways to the central terminal buildings.
From a throughput point of view it would be far better to have multi-mode runways so as an aircraft touches down a departure lines up and as the arrival clears the runway the departure takes off to be airborne before next inbound is at 2 miles. There are no wake turbulence delays as the departing aircraft wake is not interfering with the landing aircraft and vice versa. Imagine if you like 4 Gatwicks alongside each other. So the airport has widely spaced non-interfering approaches to widely spaced runways with terminal buildings between each pair of runways linked by underground rail to the other terminals. Each terminal has two potential multi-mode runways alongside that will not require runway crossing after landing or before takeoff.
But why think about airport design let's make do with the way it's always been done.
Operating interleaved departures and arrivals on all of your runways sounds like a great way of unnecessarily p*ssing off the maximum number of communities surrounding an airport.
Maybe the way it's always been done isn't such a bad idea after all.