How many lives do the man hours spent commuting, or toiling away to afford higher rents waste?

Zero.

Not every man’s hour is equal.

What generally gets areas in trouble is locations that used to be a good get worse as aircraft get larger and the surroundings get built up. The solution is to send larger airplanes to a new airport, but it’s not free and there’s no clear line when things get unacceptably dangerous.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/zhZdA5tWGAKunM2e8

(This is widely considered a misfeature of San Jose - it limits the height of buildings in downtown San Jose to 10 stories because the downtown is directly under the flight path of arriving flights, it limits runway length and airport expansion, and it means that planes and their noise fly directly over key tourist attractions like the Rose Garden and Convention Center. If we ever had a major plane crash like this one in San Jose it would be a disaster, because the airport is bounded by 101 on the north, 880 on the south, the arriving flight path goes right over downtown, and the departing flight path goes right over Levi's Stadium, Great America, and several office buildings.)

So while downtown being in the flight path is a risk there was some method to the madness which caused that alignment.

In addition, the terrain rises in both directions (so sharply on one side that planes can't use ILS when landing from that direction).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_International_Airport

It's hard to project growth. Things build right up to the limit of the airport for convenient access, then the area grows and the airport needs to grow - and what do you do? Seattle-Tacoma is critically undersized for the traffic it gets and has been struggling with the fact that there's physically nowhere to expand to.

Obviously you’re better off making such decisions early rather than building a huge airport only to abandon it. Thus it’s called urban planning not urban triage.

My magic crystal ball named "the past 50yr of history" says it is unlikely to be the success you envision.

It's easy to say "just build bigger elsewhere" but unless you go dozens of miles out and add hours to every trip to/from the airport there's no options.

And no, "just fill in every body of water" is not an option. It doesn't work at all in many cases, is hilariously expensive in all cases, and has enormous environmental impact.

The ultimate reason so many cities use land reclamation for airports is open water does not lose property value by being near the airport. Thus a given greater metropolitan area regains not just the physical land of the airport but the increased property value from all that land that’s no longer next to an airport.

There was a significant crash there in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAM_Airlines_Flight_3054

That works in costal areas, but not inland.

There's no large body of water near the Louisville airport.

But also there's a lot of urban and suburban development you'd have to displace to even consider moving the airport near the Ohio River for most miles both up and down stream of Louisville.

As to a crash, ditching into an industrial area isn’t significantly worse for the passengers than ditching into a set of rapids, but the rapids are far better for the general public.

Had the crash happened in a different direction there might be other complaints, sure, but even airports with large bodies of water neighboring them only generally neighbor a side or two.

Yeah, the terrain around Louisville poses a challenge for placing an airport, but they could do like Cincinnati does, and have their airport located across the river. Or place it between Frankfurt and Louisville. Or do like Pittsburg and make the terrain flat enough for an international airport.

Rivers have a nice property where they tend to be the lowest thing around because water flows downhill and are quite long. For approaches from other directions half the time you end up crossing the river at some angle which acts as a buffer zone, thus reducing the total land lost as a buffer zone.

Ever see Dallas Love Field?

https://maps.app.goo.gl/A94EdexYwfpyeMxa7

Lots of airports are pretty much immediately adjacent to their city centers.

Taipei Songshan, Boston Logan and the old Hong Kong Kai Tak to name a few.

Hong Kong Kai Take would be a solid example except it closed in 1998 because of how the city grew. Look at maps from 1950 and it doesn’t look like a bad location for a small airport.

It actually requires using tunnels or a boat. I used to drive a cab and the I93 + Callahan/Sumner tunnel route was hellish. The Big Dig helped a lot, although sometimes that can get pretty backed up too.

> Look at maps from 1950 and it doesn’t look like a bad location for a small airport.

Generally, airports that are close to major urban centers were developed prior to 1950, including all 3 examples named. Songshan was opened during Taiwan's colonial period as the “Matsuyama Airdrome” serving Japanese military flights (https://www.sups.tp.edu.tw/tsa/en/1-1.htm).

For bigger cities with these old central airports, larger airports were opened later in many cases. I don't think that will ever happen in Boston, although satellite airports in neighboring states like "Manchester-Boston" or TF Greene in Rhode Island try pretty hard.

Somewhere I have a GoPro video of me on my motorcycle waiting for a freight train at a crossing in traffic while a 747 flies overhead ("Planes, Trains, and Automobiles"). It's a pretty transportation-dense area.

Queens, NY has entered the chat…

You’re correct, but at least LaGuardia airport generally has takeoffs over water.

LaGuardia aircraft landings may happen over dense apartment buildings, but less likely for catastrophic damage (glide path, less fuel, engines are <10% throttle, etc)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisades_del_Rey,_California

Burbank Airport has quiet hours and has left a bunch of commercially zoned area under that takeoff path.

I’m in Atlanta now and they bought up a lot of land around the airport when redeveloping it and do similar zoning tricks for the buffer. One of the buffer zones is the Porsche Experience. It’s loud as heck when you’re on the part of the track closest but not bad where the corporate HQ and paddock is

And some people just won't really get used to it. I've lived near airplane noise and I never got used to it. I also don't sleep better with white noise. I sleep worse.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Cedarhurst,+NY+11516/John+F....

Also, the map you're looking at there is relatively low resolution. I would suggest looking at it in https://maps.dot.gov/BTS/NationalTransportationNoiseMap/; make sure to switch the "Modes:" to "All Modes"

Fast fwd 15 years and now the city is telling us how unsafe it is to live there, passing out studies about how airplane noise will ruin your life, etc. And they made the buyout 'optional', knowing they'd railroad the holdouts, which they did. They'd tear down every house and the road leading to your house as they went, until the holdouts gave in.

All of a sudden my neighborhood is gone. And that awful, noisy, unsafe to live in place...is full of workers in cheap steel warehouses. I guess it's more safe for them.

Many people may not realize, but UPS and Ford absolutely own Louisville. If either says jump, the city government will ask how high?

I think their point just got made in a way that can't be ignored.

Oddly enough the pamphlets they kept sending out focused on irritability, poor grades, confusion, sleep problems, etc, and never mentioned the possibility of being fragged by a wayward jet.

I say that only partially in jest, looking at a map now, we were only 2 or so miles as the crow flies from the end of their runway and in the direct path..

I'm trying to imagine this same thing happening with a subdivision in the same location where this plane crashed and the headlines that would have generated. As bad as this is, that alternative disaster would have been on an entirely different level.

I also hope that as a result of this crash there will be a global review of the placing of airports, especially the ones that are pretty much in cities with the flight path directly over houses during final approach and just after take-off.

This is a good example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiPyrfEuOeo

And yes, they're space constrained. But, given enough time...