Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Airport of the Future (1967)

Since I was stuck at Chicago's O'Hare Airport all day, here's an article from the December 1, 1967 European edition of Stars and Stripes, which describes the airport of the future.


An architect says he has an answer to the complaint that the longest and hardest part of a trip often is getting from home to the airport.

Martin Schaffer, chairman of the board of an airplane architectural firm, envisions "containerized" passengers transported from near their homes to the plane and then to their destinations without leaving the seats in which they started.

Schaffer, who served as project coordinator on construction of O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, says new airport facilities will be obsolete before they leave the drawing board unless some drastic changes are made.

"Airlines already have enough equipment in the air and on order to swamp every airport in the country by 1970," he said.

"Getting through traffic to the airport, and the handling of passengers and their baggage becomes more of a problem daily," Schaffer said, "but with plans for 500 and 750-passenger planes to go into service in the next few years our airports will become chaotic."

Schaffer emphasized that bigger airports with more buildings are not the answer.

Shaffer's airport of the future has no large terminal buildings but consists mainly of runways for jets and circular landing pads for vertical takeoff planes. These planes are in the design stage, Shaffer said, and resemble helicopters except that they go faster and are propelled by rotating engines instead of blades.

Shaffer said long, tiring drives to the airport followed by parking problems, long ticket lines, baggage check-in lines and then the long walk to the boarding area would be eliminated by his new transport system.

Shaffer foresees passengers with their baggage boarding a "pod" from gathering points in the area serviced by the airport, Shaffer explained that the pods would be car-like compartments running on monorails through tunnels like an underground system or on an air cushion.

Several pods, carrying about 75 passengers each, would be scheduled for a specific flight, Shaffer said, and after picking up the passengers at designated stops, would go directly to the field.

Instead of seats for passengers, planes would consist of a large frame in which the pods would be inserted, the way baggage compartments are insterted into a frame now, Shaffer said.

The pods could be detached from the air frame upon landing and could carry the passengers to different points at their destination, he said.

"We've got the technology to build this type of system within the next 15 years," Shaffer said.


See also:
Commuter Helicopter (1947)

8 comments:

Aneet said...

That would be really nice! However it is 37 years since 1970.. Real unfortunate that such a 'Mass Transit system' hasn't emerged!

I have been stuck at many an airport myself and it is not always a very nice experience!

~Aneet
www.piscatorial-chronicles.blogspot.com

Liza Blake said...

This is a similar idea to the Aramis system that began development in Paris -- Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology tells all about it ...

Anonymous said...

Nice? How?! You get to sit hours longer than you do already -- doing nothing, being shuttled in a combination bus / cargo container (presumably without food or beverages available) from site to site until you get to the airport, where you're latched into an airframe (hello, unnecessary complexity meets chaos theory!).

Anonymous said...

Sheesh! Had this guy never heard the words "passenger train" before?

Simon said...

It's a dream that will never be realized.

Anonymous said...

Love your interesting blog. Thanks!!

~Suzanne

seda said...

nice theme for a blog
i wanna appreciate your curiosity and creativity
i've been thinkin' on writin' my thesis about vision of future cities (depending on fiction novels and movies)(i am an architect and will become an urban designer)
so be sure I'll be the fan of 'ur blog:)

Anonymous said...

Tom Veil,

Passengers want to get to their destinations quickly. Good luck doing that in a country the size of the US or Australia via train. Trains are great for short (<150 miles) distances, but become outmoded beyond that. That's why in the US we send goods that don't have to be there today via rail and passengers who want to arrive quickly via air. Amazing how the market works when you let it.

The real obvious problem with this idea is security, but the futurist can probably be forgiven because airplane hijackings really only came into vogue in the 1970s.