Could Floating Airports Be in Our Near Future? 

The idea of floating airports in the middle of the sea might be a way to help busy airports.

With ever-increasing air traffic around the world, many metropolises and islands find it hard to expand their airports in order to improve severely congested air hubs. The problem with urban settings in big cities is the difficulty in finding feasible space to expand runways.

However, CNN reports that there are several projects across the globe looking to capitalize on the idea of floating airports. Since there is potential for little-to-no space utilized on land, the idea would be to build a floating airport on the sea or off the coast.

The concept isn’t new — projects in the same vein date as far back as World War II — but the designs never seem to get very far. Currently, there are projects in various stages of planning in San Diego, the Caribbean, and London, but cost concerns stall construction.

The San Diego project, which would theoretically build an expansion of the airport off the coast of Point Loma, has a lot of similarities to the floating airport concept devised by Terry Drinkard, an American aeronautical engineer who has conducted extensive research in this field. Drinkard’s project would be an offshore “aerotropolis“: a floating structure that, besides handling medium aircraft, would also host a whole range of economic and research activities, from experimentation with renewable energy technology to aquaculture and yachting. The structure would be self-sufficient, powered by waves, sun, and ocean thermal energy conversion, a technology that produces electricity by utilizing the temperature differences between depths of seawater.

There is still the matter of how these projects will be financed. At the end of the day, it’s not a matter of technology, but of economic motivation.

[Photo: Gensler/Testrad]