One by one travelling up the scale we’ll reveal incredible stories behind these Airports and the inventions that transformed them to city like mega structures.
London’s Heathrow Airport is one of the busiest Airports in the world. It hands half a million flights that could easily feed the entire population of UK through its gates every year. In fact the Airport to get this big, it took a series of major technological innovations.
Here are the seven landmarks of Airport, leading in the evolution of aviation growth. At the heart of each one lies a technology that allowed Airports to feed more people through their gates, safely quickly and comfortably. One by one travelling up the scale we’ll reveal incredible stories behind these Airports and the inventions that transformed them to city like mega structures.
Let us move around the 7 ingenious leaps that enabled Airports to get from big to bigger into the worlds biggest. Heathrow Airport is the Britain’s gateway to the world and a huge powerhouse for the country’s economy. To understand how Heathrow became this big, we need to go back in time and look at how Airport’s journey began. Let’s get started.
The first big breakthrough came from a small Airport, just outskirt of London.
Leap 1: ATC (Air Traffic Controller)
In 1920, Croydon was the main Airport in London. Aviation was very young and navigation was primitive. The pilots made use of the landmarks, such as coastlines, rivers, large towns, roadways. But the pilot’s eyeballs could not always be trusted. On 7th of April, 1922, a French Pilot heading out of Paris Airport dropped below the clouds. Scanning the ground for landmarks, he did not realize that a cargo plane from Croydon was approaching on exactly the same way.
This was the first collision in the history of Civil Aviation that killed 7 people. It was an accident waiting to happen. To stop such disasters from ever happening again, Croydon invented a clever new technology. Every aircraft heading towards the Airport would have to send out a radio burst. A radio receiver in Croydon then would measure the angle of the signal pitch, would reveal where the plane was coming from. Croydon now knew planes coordinates, they could safely guide it to the Airport. This was the birth of Air Traffic Control or popularly known as ATC.
In 1924, Croydon Airport had over 60 flights per week. Today, Heathrow pushes in a hundred flights per hour. Air traffic control guides planes out of the sky and hands them over to the ground traffic control. They need to see every tail fin on the tarmac with their own eyes. Air Traffic Control technology allows more airplanes to reach Airports safely. But as Airports became cluttered with aircrafts, it gets more difficult for passengers to board and un-board safely for London Gatwick Airport to take on 20,000 passengers, they needed to bring planes and passenger closer together without yet keeping them apart.
Leap 2: Terminal
In the 1920’s, air travel was only for the super rich. But conditions at the airfields were far from first class. People had to walk across windy apron to reach the plane. It was fairly sort of a primitive kind of activity for the pampered rich people.
Boarding planes was not just convenient; it was downright dangerous. Propellers and human bodies’ did not mix well. But in 1933, it changed. Morris Jackman wanted to offer passengers at Gatwick Airport something revolutionary, a Terminal, but struggled to find the right shape for the building. Then his father, suggested him to go with the round shape terminal and thus there he found his eureka moment. Round shaped was ideal for both passenger and plane.
With round building, each plane could quickly and independently taxi to its gates to unload, refill and load up again and inside the beehive (which he named his terminal) passengers wait in comfort, until telescopic canopies took them right to the aircraft door. The beehive was the first working terminal in the world. Heathrow Airport took the idea of fast turnaround to the extreme. Planes rarely spent more than 90 minutes on the ground and taking off again. The invention of the terminal speeded up passengers boarding and passengers turnaround. Now the old propeller aircraft could not keep up with passengers’ numbers. Then came the era of Jet planes, it carried more passengers but brought new challenges as well. To build an Airport big enough for 1,50,000 passengers, Chicago needed a leap forward in runway design.
Leap 3: Touchdown (Runway)
Airlines of the 1950’s loved the new jets. They flew faster and further than any of the most advanced propeller (reciprocating engine) planes. But this new breed of airplanes needed, a new breed of Airports too. The engines of a Boeing 707 weighed 3 times more than those of a DC propeller plane and carried 19 times more fuel and 8 times more passengers. One 707 weighed as much as 13 Dc3s. Traditional runways just were unable to handle the colossal Jets. When the city of Chicago patented a new Airport of the Jet age, they knew that they needed an upgrade on the Airport runway to take on the Jets. Engineers of the Chicago Airport tried to make their runway stronger by embedding steel cages on the concrete. But they could hand-build the runway only in small sections which was slow and expensive.
Then they discovered a marvelous machine to lay concrete faster than any human being-The Slip Form Paver. These machines could build runways in long strips without stopping. They were immensely fast and the concrete they laid was smooth, flawless, strong, and perfect for Engineers and Jets.
Heathrow Airport was facing the biggest leap in airplane size since the Boeing 747. The Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger plane, 7 storey tall and 200 tones is heavier than a jumbo jet. The A-380, a 560 tones of airplane, when fully loaded pushed concrete technology to the very limit. But the Jet brought another challenge for airports. No matter how advanced the planes were, all jets have a soft spot. Their engines were so close to the ground that it sucked in objects lying on the runway. This is always fatal. 25th of July 2000, Concord, the biggest iconic commercial airliner in aviation history became the victim of a small metal strip picked up from the runway. 114 people died in the disaster. To keep Jets safe, airports must keep their runways clean at its maximum with no room for error.
The invention of the Jet allowed airlines to carry more passengers for less money. But Jets took up more space than the propeller planes, so the terminals must grew larger. Reaching the plane soon became the test of endurance. Flying now involved too much walking, to process million of travelers comfortably.
Leap 4: Mobility
In the 1960’s Airports grew bigger than ever to make space for the larger Jets, so big that the passengers got left behind. Passengers began to complain, that they had to walk for such a long distance. When Dallas Love Field built a corridor half a kilometer long, they realized that passengers needed an easier ride.
They found inspiration in a California Quarry. Rocks form that quarry travel over 15 kilometres on the world’s longest conveyer belt to the Chester Dam, if rubber can carry rocks, surely it can carry people. So the Engineers of Love Field Airport fitted their corridors with a rubber conveyer. They kept wooden pallets running along rails under the rubber belt to give passengers a solid platform. They called it- The Glide Ride.
Driven by a single motor, the belt carried passengers to their gates effortlessly. When Love Field opened, two hundred thousand sightseers came to admire the world’s first moving sidewalk at an airport. The airlines were much happier about the result because their passengers moved more quickly to the terminals. Today the problem of moving people extends far beyond the Airport itself.
Heathrow’s terminal features a revolutionary but highly experimental transport system PRT (Personal Rapid Transport). They are the robot taxies. They are intelligent and have onboard computers. They could sense their surroundings. The concept of PRT sounds almost too good to be true.
Battery powered pods that shuttle four passengers to the terminal every three seconds, without a driver and without crashing into each other. Every second a laser measures the distance to the curve thousands of time. A computer then turns the wheel to keep the pod on the centre of the curve. A metal loop in the track detects the exact position of each vehicle. So if a pod gets too close to the one in front, the PRT central computer brings it to a stop.
As moving walkways speeded up passengers inside Airports, more and more people took off to the skies. But in the late 1960’s, skyjackers discover that planes were perfect targets, venerable and valuable. To keep 14 million people flowing through Atlanta International, the airport needed to radically tighten its security.
Leap 5: Security
In 1970 Palestinian terrorist’s captured 3 Jets and took them to the Jordanian desert. A new kind of war began. People were afraid to fly and the airlines were worried to lose their business. The US department decided to fight back. They kept armed Sky Marshalls on the plane. 2,000 of such people were hired and given 6 weeks of training. A well aimed shot could bring down a skyjacker but a straight bullet may bring down a plane. Putting guns against guns was not an ideal solution. Skyjackers must be stopped at the Airport before they could board a plane. This created a huge problem for the busiest airport in the world, the Atlanta International. It now has the mammoth task of spotting over 14 million passengers for one with sinister intensions. The only safe way to do that was to hand search every single passenger which would bring the airport to the grinding halt. They desperately needed a faster way to spotting hijackers. The solution came from an unexpected place- the Sawmill. The thousand dollar blade of the head saw was the heart of the operation.
Even a small metal object hidden in the wood can break the blade and could bring the mill to a complete standstill. So before the logs got any way near the sword, they must pass through a metal detector. Anything suspicious triggers an alarm. The log then would come offline for a spot check. A machine that detects nails and bullets is exactly what airports needed.
The metal detector used a large electric coil to produce an electromagnetic pulse. Any metal caught in the pulse reflects a magnetic echo. A sensor picks up the signal and triggers an alarm. What works for logs, also works for air travellers. Now Airports can spot the skyjackers without having to hand-search everyone. But metal detectors were not the final solution to the security problem. They marked the beginning of arms race between technology and terror. Even as the machines improved, criminals were finding ways to outweigh them.
On 22nd of Dec 2001, the FBI arrested a man who tried to explode an homemade bomb on a onboard plane. The person had filled his shoes with plastic explosives and smuggled them through security. But today there is the technology that can deal with the people like the shoe bomber. Archway detectors use jets of air to dislodge particles from hair and clothing. Then they suck them into a detector that sniffs out even minute traces of explosives. And backscatters X-ray machines penetrate only the clothes but not the skin to reveal hidden objects.
Security is the number one concern for the Airports today. Attacking an Airport doesn’t just hurt people; it can hurt an entire economy. Heathrow has special scanners to check 80,000 passengers each day. The machine uses multi beam X-ray to measure the atomic weight of every single baggage item. Then they automatically highlight a suspicious item which speeds up the scanning process.
The introduction of security checks in the 1970s reassured travellers that flying is safe. More and more people took the skies which brought next big challenge for Airports. There were even more bags than travelers. To keep those bags moving at Los Angeles, the airport needed to make a big leap into the future. In 1975 Los Angeles processed nearly 24 million passengers and twice as many bags, a nightmare for baggage handlers. But Los Angeles has found a way to crack an age old problem.
Leap 6: Baggage Handling
In a summer of 1974, a pack of gum gave a way forward in baggage handling. It was the first product fitted with a new technology called a Bar Code. Product information encoded in white lines between black bars. The lines reflected the light of a laser scanner which was picked up by a sensor. A computer then deciphered the code and displayed the price. But when Western Airlines introduced the bar code at Los Angeles, there was a problem. The tag could be anywhere on a bag, even under it. So they fired up lasers from every angle, even from below. A central computer then processed the tag data and directed each bag to the right aircraft. Now that the machines could read bag tags, baggage handling became much faster, it was not full proof as it still relies having humans in the loop.
Leap 7: Future proof
Heathrow began like many other airports, on a groggy field. Originally designed to accommodate 45 million passengers, now it handles more than a 100 million passengers. Airports today must reclaim the magic that they have lost in their quest to expand. A hundred years ago, air travel started as an adventure for the rich and famous. Now it’s a global industry. And often that’s what passengers felt like on an Airport today, processed like merchandise, passed from one queue to the next. As airports have grown, they have lost their soul. They must design to be the future delivering both magic and simplicity to passengers. This is how folks, airport started and evolved. After all, the Airports are becoming the life line of the country’s economy.
