XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Aviation industry has been in existence for over one hundred years. The first officially registered flight took place in 1903 and lasted only 12 seconds. As far back as 1914, the first civilian airline with regular flights to the USA (Benoist Aircraft Company) appeared, and the most famous among the first companies that retained its original name was KLM (Netherlands), created in 1919. The first civilian airports with hard surface runways began regular passenger flights handling after the World War I, mainly from the 1920s. Among them were, for example, Atlantic City, Schiphol, Sydney, Minneapolis, Koenigsberg, Moscow, Kharkov, Hamburg and others.

Throughout the 20th century, new technologies appeared: the invention of autopilot, new types of engines, location systems, communications, requirements for the infrastructure and maintenance of the airports changed, and as a result, the architectural features of airport complexes were constantly evolving. In the 1960s and 1970s, the most famous and popular aircraft models came out - such as Boeing 737 and Airbus-300 which are still in operation. Beginning from the 1970s, deregulation began in the United States and later around the world, allowing aviation to enter a new stage of development and become accessible to a wider range of people.

With the beginning of the aviation development, an understanding about the necessary infrastructure composition and models for servicing airport patterns was not formed but from the very beginning they were associated with the advanced infrastructure or “cities of the future”. At the beginning of the century the opened possibility of moving to any part of the world that is habitual today fascinated and attracted with its innovativeness. The earliest known concepts of futuristic airports date back to the 1920s and represent airports on the roofs of skyscrapers, round airports, as well as multi-level hubs, combined, for example, with ship docks in the port.

The existing development of large airports or urban structures known as “aerotropolis” resemble the concepts of the City of Tomorrow. It seems that modern airports have embodied all the wildest fantasies about the futuristic cities of the 20th century, and even surpassed them in terms of architecture. The world’s largest airports have a passenger throughput between 30 and more than 100 million passengers per year and are actually small towns with their own population, territory, infrastructure and a control center.

The airports such as Denver (USA), Schiphol (Netherlands), Frankfurt and Munich (Germany), Doha (Qatar) and others are constructing full-fledged residential neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of the terminals to provide housing needs for their employees, representatives of international companies, students of flying schools, as well as residents of the neighboring cities running international business. Such airports are actually large city-forming enterprises that have a positive impact on the economy of the region and nearby cities by creating new jobs, attracting large companies, providing a higher degree of mobility, building new infrastructure, etc. The existing commercialization of airports leads to the development of all possible types of services in the territory of influence, often beyond their borders.

The airport as well as the city provides infrastructure for life: housing, offices, kindergartens and schools, shopping malls, sports and health centers, public spaces and its own event program, including international conferences, exhibitions, fairs, auctions, workshops, tours and tours, attractions of nearby cities.

According to the forecasts of various international organizations, global passenger traffic will grow to 6 billion people a year by 2030. In this regard, airports strive to build up their infrastructure and develop as urban entities in order to meet the need for mobility at the modern society service level. According to existing estimates, there are more than one hundred potential aerotropolises at various stages of development in the world, and in such countries as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, the world's largest new aviation nodes are already being constructed. Moreover, the passenger flow of such airports is usually many times higher than the population of the country itself.

In real construction, such concepts, of course, were practically not taken into account, since the architecture of the airport complexes was primarily based on technological parameters, requirements for logistics, economics and security. Nevertheless, the terminal architecture from the very beginning personified advanced technologies and embodied the future as it was presented at each period of time. So, for example, the famous TWA terminal (Trans World Airlines) at New York Airport named by John F. Kennedy (JFK), opened in 1962 upon the project of E. Saarinen personifies flying and still looks modern. It is preserved as a cultural heritage site and is currently being converted to a hotel.

Despite the current and developed system of modern airports, the concept of “futuristic” hubs periodically appears, many of which rethink or complement the early ideas of the 20th century. According to the ACARE European Research Center (Advisory Consul for Aviation Research and Innovation in Europe), by 2050 the gate-to-gate way time for 90% of air passengers should be no more than four hours. This applies to intra-European routes and sounds ambitious taking into consideration how much time it often takes to get to the airport and go through all stages of control. However, when flying from Munich to Berlin, for example, you can now keep within almost four hours.

In connection with such plans, a group of German researchers of the Bauhaus Aviation Institute (Bauhaus Luftfahrt) together with the Glasgow School of Art developed the concept of a multi-level and relatively compact airport for the urban environment, where the runway is located on the roof of the complex, and all public and technical facilities are at the lower levels. The project offers a small air hub, designed only for short-haul aircrafts with a capacity of up to 60 passengers, which could be located in the center of a busy metropolis and provide quick communication between cities by analogy with a regular station.

Another project was developed at the Netherlands Research Institute (Netherlands Aerospace Center) under the leadership of Henk Hesselink (Henk Hesselink). His concept is based on the idea of ​​building a round runway or “endless strip”. Theoretically, such a geometry could provide the necessary length for the flying-off and landing, the ability to take off and land from either side of the strip, depending on the direction of the wind, would facilitate breaking action due to the centripetal force. It is worthy of note that a few years earlier a similar concept for a round airport was proposed by a student of the University of Science from Malaysia.

The competition “Airport of the Future” (Fentress Global Challenge “Airport of the Future”), which annually selects the best ideas, has been held with the support of Fentress since 2011. The format of the competition allows you to submit any, even the most unrealistic concepts that allow a different look at the airport infrastructure. It presents projects of multilevel airports, air hubs on the water, environmentally oriented hubs, modular airports, etc. It is interesting that, unlike the early concepts of the 20th century, many of them located airports on the roofs of buildings, in the “Airport of the Future” competition, a number of projects suggest hiding airport infrastructure and even runways underneath the ground.