Random musings...

[Immigrant]

My buddy and I have had a tradition of playing EA Tiger Woods golf (currently on '12) every Sunday for the last 10 years or so.

I'm gonna totally kick his a$$ today.

 

[FilterFunk]

How do Steven Wright and Gary Larson think of all those things?

 

[fhm555]

Agreed, but there are over 19,000 airports in the US so a good portion of the population lives just a few miles from some type of airfield. Of those 19,000 airports, less than 500 airports have commercial airline service.

Source:
Link Removed

But do a little math. Roughly 300 million people in America so just for giggles and to skew it to the low side, call it 100 million daily commuters and assume every airport would be able to take a full share of those commuters. If my ciphering is correct, that's just north of 10,500 arrivals and departures each field would need to handle on the average work day in this hypothetical America. That's just over 7 arrivals/departures per minute over 24 hours just to get everyone down and back up.

Since it's pretty much a given that major population centers will bear the brunt of this traffic, take JFK, Heathrow, or Hartsfield and imagine the scale of an operation large enough to safely handle all the traffic they would be subjected to every day. Not to mention the little grass strips out in the middle of nowhere. Who would have any need to use a strip that's further from work than home would be? There is also the fact that the majority of those 19,000 strips are one horse operations in the boonies that serve more as storage space for the handful of local aircraft owners than as function airports.

The grass strip where I learned to fly was lucky if it averaged 10 arrivals and/or departures a week, and unless you were a peanut farmer you would have no real need to go there if you flew to work.