Distinguished scientists and engineers are entering the fight against moving Lindbergh Field to MCAS Miramar.
They aren’t berating joint use, however; they’re proposing another alternative: an offshore airport.
Frieder Seible, dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Walter Munk, Secretary of the Navy Chair in Oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), believe that an offshore airport is an attractive, feasible and cost-effective option for San Diego.
The academics touted the concept during an Aug. 10 meeting of the La Jolla Town Council.
Passengers would continue to check in at Lindbergh Field, but would then catch a maglev train or traverse an underwater tunnel to reach the offshore airfields, between 2 and 4 miles out to sea.
A variety of options are available for constructing the airfields, according to Seible. They could be built as floating platforms moored to the bottom of the bay or, if closer to shore, as a pile-supported platform “” essentially a massive bridge.
The cost is also within reason at approximately $6 billion, according to Munk. He attained the estimate through conversations with Japan, which has created a prototype of an offshore airport, and the Pentagon, which is pursuing similar endeavors.
Compared to other alternatives studied by the Airport Authority, locating the airfields out in the ocean is suddenly not so expensive, Seible said.
The proposal to send the airport out to Imperial County was estimated at $17.4 billion, or $6.3 billion to move it to Camp Pendleton. Moving the airport to Miramar is the cheapest of the options at $5.9 billion.
“It’s very comparable to what we pay today for our big bridges,” Seible said.
The offshore airfields would also solve San Diego’s noise pollution once and for all, Munk said.
While an offshore airport does not yet exist in the world, plenty of entities and countries have studied it extensively, including Japan and the U.S. Department of Defense, Seible said.
The San Francisco International Airport is planning to build three offshore runways. Seible chairs the Seismic Advisory Board for the San Francisco Airport Authority.
The scholars criticized the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority for dismissing the offshore idea as ludicrous.
They think “it’s a crazy idea, too modern, innovative and technically not feasible,” Seible said. “This is not correct.”
San Diego has plenty of local resources and expertise to carry out the proposal, including experts at UCSD, SIO, General Atomics, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and General Dynamics NASSCO.
The proposal would certainly entail a host of environmental problems, Munk admitted. Thin, transparent columns would have to mitigate the wave shadow that the airfields could cast over the coast of Point Loma.
Bay fog could pose a hazard, but Munk said he has heard that all aircraft landings may utilize GPS (global positioning satellites) in a decade or so.
“But the area of San Diego does have frequent fogs and that needs to be considered,” Munk said.
The airfields would have to sit 25 to 30 feet above sea level to avoid wave swells.
San Diego does have an advantage in that it has a unique collection of ocean data that could help planners manage oceanic conditions, Munk said.
He dismissed concerns that the airfields would disrupt whale migration patterns.
Seismic concerns can also be overcome, according to Seible. Today’s technology would allow an airport to be fully operational within 20 minutes following a major earthquake.
The chance of an offshore airport hinges on the result of the November ballot, according to the scholars. If voters say yes to moving the airport to MCAS Miramar, then the offshore concept will go unheeded. If it’s a “no” vote, however, then discussion will open once again.
“I think it’s time that someone steps up,” Seible said. “We can’t make progress if we say that it can’t be done here because it’s not been done elsewhere.”