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Fighting fog for airports

Sketch from Ric's notebook looking at key issues ie area that needs to be fog free
(75m before strip starts) and possible solutions to look at
It is now 1.5 hours since we were meant to board for a flight to Sydney from Coolangatta and I'm brainstorming how to fix the fog problem at airports... when I asked the pilot what area needs to be fog free he explained that planes in Australia are rated to land with only 75 metres of visibility which means that the runway must be visible from 75 metres in front of the runway. This means that a relatively small area of less than 10,000 square meteres could be cleared of fog to allow most planes to land in even the heaviest atmospheric fog.

As shown above a small area like this is commonly cleared of water using flood fans and heaters in buildings so the idea of dispersing fog with wind turbines, burners or magnetic fields is not out of the question... lets see where this idea takes us...

Comments

  1. You don't have to worry about the fog, planes can land with zero visibility if Australia just upgraded their airports to allow Cat3 landings. They already do it in many parts of the world (we are behind the times here in Oz). The technology already exists to overcome this problem it just needs to be applied.

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  2. I imagine this is a three dimensional problem, where (75m x altitude of plane on landing approach x width of runway = area that needs to be clear from fog).

    In other words, how high up does it need to go?

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  3. What about a rectangle shaped heater that uses convection - possibly solar powered. A slab of concrete the size of the rectangle as a heat sink with under floor heating in it that has a trickle feed to keep it above a certain temperature - insulated from the ground.

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