Mor Temor
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2.23 Floating Airports and Mobile Offshore Base
In circa 1920, Edward Armstrong proposed the concept of a seadrome (an aerodrome in the sea) as stepping stones for aircrafts flying across the oceans. At that time, the planes could not travel long distances and needed refueling. In 1943, US Navy Civil Engineers Corps constructed a floating airfield (1810 ft x272 ft) consisting of 10,920 pontoons. It has a flight deck and a parking area. However, the enthusiasm for building these floating airfields was dampened by the extraordinary non-stop flight of Charles Lindbergh from New York to Paris in 1927.
In more recent times, a different sort of problem arose. Land costs in major cities have risen considerably and city planners are considering the possibility of using the coastal waters for urban developments including having floating airports. As the sea and the land near the water edge is usually flat, landings and take-offs of aircrafts are safer. In this respect, Canada has a floating heliport in a small bay in Vancouver. Moreover, this busy traffic heliport is built for convenience as well as noise attenuation.
Japan has made great progress by constructing a large airport in the sea. Kansai International Airport at Osaka is an example of an airport constructed in the sea, albeit on a reclaimed island. The first sizeable floating runway is the one-km long Mega-Float test model built in1998 in the Tokyo bay (see Fig. 48). This floating runway was awarded the world’s largest man-made floating island in the Guinness book of records in 1999. Studies on the test model include the investigation of facilities and equipment for floating airport, development of simulation technology of functions of airport, instruments for landing, landing and taking off tests on a floating runway, effects on the environment and verification of construction technologies of a floating airport. The Mega-Float is a precursor to a 3.6-km floating runway which will augment Haneda airport facilities (see Fig. 49) (Watanabi, 2004).
Fig. 48 Mega-Float in Tokyo Bay, Japan( Photo courtesy of SRCJ).
Fig. 49 Proposed Floating Runway at Tokyo International Airport (Haneda).
The Office of Naval Research, US, has been conducting studies on the technical feasibility and costs of building a mobile offshore base. A mobile offshore base is a self-propelled, modular, floating platform that could be assembled into lengths on the order of one mile to provide logistic support of US military operations where fixed bases are not available. We may be seeing these huge mobile offshore bases in the oceans in the future (Taylor 2003).
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