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.
The ideal structure (if you have a lot of land), is something like that at KDEN. Planes can land and decelerate towards the terminal, and take off without backtracking. Further, there are staggers to avoid runway crossings on parallels.
http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1804/09077AD.PDF But then again, KDEN covers 52.4 square miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver...tional_Airport