Emergency runways

Posted by Nullebullepro@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 11 comments

Can't we build like very long runways in places far away from any airport so in emergencies, planes that cant make it to any airport can use that emergency runway as a place to stop? (If they are near that runway ofc)

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spacecadet2399@reddit

How many runways do you think we actually need? If you built one everywhere there even might be an emergency landing, the entire planet would just be runways.

In most places in the US, you are almost never even out of sight of a runway when you're up in the air. There are way more airports than you think.

That's not true everywhere in the world but it is in most wealthier countries that actually have a lot of aviation to begin with. And most of the rest of the world is pretty flat and has a lot of potential landing spots.

You only really even need a real "runway" when there's terrain, vegetation or buildings on the land. Otherwise, what is a runway but just a flat piece of ground? There's lots of that around in areas of the world without a lot of airports. Tough if you're flying around the mountains, but it's also tough to build runways up there in many cases (a lot of areas where you *could* do so already have them).

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gromm93@reddit

Actually, we do, and we have.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_George_Airport. It's an international airport, which means it has a customs office and is staffed for such, and it's got a nice, long runway where jumbo jets can land safely. This was an intentional decision to build the place, not just to service the population there (there's no real reason to have very long runways for that however), but to make a place along the route to Anchorage, which is a major hub for flights across the Pacific.

The thing about airports is that "emergency landing" is about as effective as the ability to rescue those people that are now stranded in the middle of nowhere. If instead, that airport has fuel, mechanics, and a hospital, then it's far more effective as a place to land in an emergency. Otherwise, people are just going to freeze to death if the only way in or out is by air, and the weather is bad for several days.

Generally speaking, by the way, pilots (and by extension, airlines) plan flights so that they can make runways along the way, should something go wrong. It's ingrained in us from our earliest flight lessons.

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Necessary_Result495@reddit

The country was covered with emergency runways after WW2. They have gradually disappeared as the need and the money to maintain them has gone away. Pilots have charts that show many of them. Few of them get used because they are largely unnecessary anymore. Most pilots are IFR trained (I follow roads) and recognize that we are a nation full of alternative landing facilities.

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horrible_noob@reddit

First question: how often are planes unable to make it to any airport? We have ETOPS for a reason. Smaller jets and private planes are very well capable of landing on roadways, or even fields, in a pinch.

Second question: how do you determine where to build an emergency runway? Relative to literally every other airport, that emergency runway is going to be far away from them.

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MyNameis_Not_Sure@reddit

We have that already. It’s called the interstate highway system

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Boomshtick414@reddit

What's the use case here?

In many situations, if you can't make it to any airport, a randomly located airstrip won't matter either. And if you're diverting for an emergency, you're better off crash landing at an airport staffed with resources and EMS, than at the alternative of crashing or otherwise suffering the consequences of a hard, complicated landing somewhere where EMS could be a long ways out and foggier lines of communication in preparing an emergency response.

There are a lot of "what-if" scenarios -- but really the first question is what specific problem are you suggesting needs to be solved here? And for which types of aircraft -- because airliners are a whole other thing compared to someone's Cessna.

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XenoRyet@reddit

By and large, if there's a flat piece of land big enough for a runway, in an emergency, the aircraft can just land there anyway.

Then, even if you build the thing, without maintenance and upkeep, it's going to pretty quickly get back to being about as good a place to land as it was without the runway. Planes don't have those kinds of emergencies frequently enough to justify paying for that maintenance.

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Coopics@reddit

That’s usually what long straight sections of highways are for. Having flown a general aviation single engine propeller plane for a number of years, when I was flying cross country I would usually stick to routes where I could land on a road if my engine cut out. Now that I’m flying for an airline, I’m not too worried about losing an engine.

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