5 Cartoonish Tricks Airports Use to Stay in Business
Any walk through an airport reveals a bunch of operations that seem to make no sense. You’ll see passengers lining up for 15 minutes for security and then needing to rush at the end to get their stuff into bins. Why not stretch out the area where people fill those bins, removing that bottleneck? Or, you’ll see a bunch of expensive stores selling handbags and designer shoes, and approximately zero customers are in there, because no one buys that stuff at the airport. Why not demolish all those and replace them with private bedrooms to cater to young lovers?
Other operations at airports have a lot of thought behind them. But these strategic ones might be the silliest of all.
Moving Numbers Around, Because the Earth Keeps Shifting
Airports assign numbers to their runways, and they pick these numbers using a specific system. The runway’s number describes its direction.
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Let’s say, for example, that a runway points a tiny bit south of southeast, so that it points 140 degrees from north. This runway will be called Runway 14. Actually, it will have two names because if it points 140 degrees from north going one way, it points 320 degrees from north going the other way. The runway is therefore named 14/32.
There’s just one problem, though: North moves.
The magnetic north pole can move 40 miles in a year, and over time, that means a runway that points 140 degrees might not point that way any longer. In 2019, the FAA ordered Wichita Eisenhower National Airport to rename its 14/32 runway to 15/33. The cost of repainting this and their other runways? Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Hey, when you’re shopping for new paint to pretty up your runway, you don’t want to skimp and buy the cheap stuff.
Scaring Birds with Tina Turner Songs
The greatest threat to an airport comes not from human terrorists but from avian terrorists. A busy airport might see hundreds of bird strikes a year — “bird strikes,” of course, being the official term for when a bird strikes a plane. Some bird strikes have no consequence (for the plane, even if it kills the bird). Other times, a bird flies into an engine and the plane comes crashing down.
The strongest defense against birds? Killing them — with guns. Airports have snipers devoted to killing any geese that they spot flying in a suspicious manner. Other airports employ something called acoustic deterrence. They play sounds that keep birds away. This works, not necessarily by scaring birds away with noise but by disrupting their own calls, keeping them from convening. Here’s a video of the system in action:
You might have noticed that that’s actually a video of “The Best” by Tina Turner. That’s because one Gloucester airport discovered that their usual bird distress recordings weren’t working. The van broadcasting this music happened to have a Tina Turner record handy, so they tried broadcasting that instead. It worked, and the world was saved from birds — for now.
Blasting Runways to Stop Planes from Slipping Off
Every time a plane lands, it leaves the runway in slightly worse shape for the plane that follows. This isn’t because the plane erodes the tarmac. It’s because the plane deposits something. A little bit of rubber transfers from the plane’s wheels to the ground below each time.
So, a couple times a year, the airport has to scrape the runway with high-pressure water, to remove all that rubber residue. One of these maintenance sessions might remove 100,000 square feet of rubber from a single runway.
Without this maintenance, airplanes risk slipping. The danger is a little more complicated than sliding on the rubber itself. Instead, the problem is that a runway coated in rubber won’t be able to drain properly. It will stay wet when we’d otherwise expect it to be dry, and the landing plane won’t have enough traction.
Maybe this will lead the plane to crash right into the terminal. That would likely ruin people’s entire day.
Placing the Whole Thing on Balls
What happens if a massive earthquake strikes an airport? Arguably, an airplane would be the safest place for you to be in such circumstances. You can take off, seconds before the ground beneath you crumbles. This was portrayed in the disaster film 2012, released in 2009, as well as the disaster film 2009, released in 2012.
But that offers little comfort to the people inside the airport’s buildings, who will still be facing doom. One solution? Placing an entire terminal on a bunch of ball bearings, so a little slipping and sliding in the bedrock below won’t rip the building apart at all.
The more technical name for these bearings is friction pendulum seismic isolators. When San Francisco built their international terminal a couple decades ago, they plopped it on 267 of these gizmos. If an 8.0 earthquake hits the city, the terminal will be fine. If a 10.0 earthquake hits, it won’t, but nothing else will be fine either, so let’s not bother planning for that.
Burning Garbage, for Money
Let’s say you don’t finish your salad on a plane. Where do those leaves of lettuce go? If you’re traveling internationally, don’t expect the airline to send them to a landfill or a compost pile. You’re not supposed to carry any kind of plant or animal matter when you cross the border, because that dead leaf might just set off the next invasive plague.
All trash from the plane must be incinerated. And that doesn’t mean the airline can just pile a bunch of bags of trash on a truck to go to some incinerator in the middle of the city. That’s probably exactly what the psycho who dropped anthrax-cholera gum wrappers in the plane wants the airline to do. No — for maximum safety, all trash from this international flight must be burned in the airport itself. So, you can expect the airport to have a massive incinerator on the property, where they can dispose of such garbage (and dispose of passengers who argue with TSA agents).
The airport charges the airline for this service. One airport in Wisconsin, for example, will charge $125 for every small bag of garbage it burns and double that for a large bag. Sadly, now that we’ve made this business public, airlines have another expense they can complain about when they raise fares. When you ask for a fee breakdown on your next ticket, expect a line item labeled “incineration fee.”
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