Denver International Airport Read online



  DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  John Janovy, Jr.

  Copyright © 2013

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  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book is free and can be used for non-commercial purposes although any such use should be accompanied by a statement of credit and permission (see Copyright and Permissions at the end). Thank you for respecting the author’s copyrighted work. For any additional information, feel free to contact the author at [email protected].

  Designed by John Janovy, Jr.

  ISBN: 9781301811533

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  Contents:

  Prologue

  Denver International Airport

  Copyright and Permissions

  Author Information

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  Return to Table of Contents

  Prologue:

  Back in the 1990s, I got a surprise telephone call from a stranger, a man named Jim Starry, who turned out to be an amazingly creative environmentalist thinker. He was living in Colorado at the time and wanted to talk about the Denver airport. Over the next couple of years, we worked on a book manuscript entitled Simple Solutions, my attempt to put Starry’s most visionary thoughts into some kind of a narrative that would end up getting published and making a difference in the way we humans interacted with our planet and solved the big problem of retaining our humanity in the face of all those forces conspiring to strip us of it—overpopulation, pollution, climate change, exponential growth in the use of fixed resources such as land, water, and fossil fuel, and of course the lethal conflict that seems to be more and more a characteristic of our species. My literary agent was not very impressed with this attempt to change the world into a better place by writing a book and declined to pursue my proposal. Needless to say Jim and I were disappointed, but at the time I was very busy with research and teaching, and simply was not able to complete my part of the project.

  In recent years, however, the Internet has come to provide many avenues for distribution of ideas, including those rejected not only by literary agents, but also sometimes by politicians who seem to rarely if ever have read a book. In addition, I am now retired and have a little more time to pick up projects that for some reason or another failed to see the light of day earlier in my career. Denver International Airport is one of those projects, the second chapter in our book project entitled Simple Solutions. Having been written mostly in the late 1990s, the essay is a little bit dated, but I decided to leave it pretty much as written except for the last few pages. Feel free to share this piece with anyone you know who might be headed through Denver for any reason, although I ask that you consult the citation instructions at the end and give Jim Starry and me our proper credit. Thanks! - JJJr

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  2. Denver International Airport

  Which one of you can name the gent who fueled the Lindbergh plane?

  Col. Loren M. Reno

  Split, Croatia

  November 26, 1997

  For what seems like the thousandth time in the past thirty years, far above the arid plains of eastern Colorado, I stow my tray table, raise my seat to its upright position, check my seat belt, and stare out the window. The South Platte River winds feebly through the dusty landscape. Center pivot irrigation circles reveal someone’s attempt to counter the Rocky Mountains’ rain shadow, a geophysical phenomenon that dictates the region’s agricultural economy. Two miles below, Denver International Airport’s white tent-like peaks arise out of the short-grass prairie then move past my vision as the plane turns. The pilot assures us we’ll be on the ground in a few minutes. No matter what happens in those next few minutes, however, this landing is guaranteed to be like none of the other thousand. A telephone call from a stranger changes forever my perception of air travel. Denver, with endless prairies stretching from its eastern boundary and $2.2 billion to spend, builds an airport, says Jim Starry. Put the runway at a 2% grade, add in a design that greatly reduces taxi time, and you save a hundred million gallons of jet fuel a year. And that’s only at Denver. Why doesn’t anyone seem to want this idea? Jim wonders. I can’t answer that question.

  “Four hundred new airports will be constructed world wide within the next decade,” he says, drawing on FAA estimates. “The calculations are very simple. There were seven hundred flights a day in and out of old Stapleton. A Boeing 747 burns 48 gallons of jet fuel just turning on the thrust reverse, a 727 burns 37 gallons. It’s pretty easy to figure out how much fuel you’d save if they landed uphill, up that 2% grade.” He gives me a quick rundown of the figures, based mainly on the weight of an airliner rolling uphill. A Boeing 747 could, in theory, use some of its own 400,000lb landing weight to slow itself down. “Then you add in the fuel spent just to taxi up to the terminal. At Stapleton, they used 56.7 million gallons every year just to taxi. Then you calculate the fuel savings if planes took off down a 2% grade.” By the time he’s finished converting the slope of prairie underneath a runway into jet fuel cost savings, I’m hooked on Jim Starry’s simple solutions.

  “Landing up a grade saves 2.3 million gallons a year,” he summarizes. “Takeoff down the same grade saves 8.2 million. Rearrange the relationship between terminal and runway, you save 45 million gallons. So you’re looking at about $36 million annual savings at Stapleton alone.” Above Stapleton’s replacement, the new Denver International, again moves slowly past my window like faraway tents on the prairie. DEN (the boarding pass abbreviation) is an obvious improvement over Stapleton (known as DIA); two thousand flights a day now come in and out of the new airport. By applying Starry’s formula for jet fuel savings to DEN, one arrives at a 176,260,000 gallon annual fuel savings on landing, taking off, and taxiing, had someone built his design. He adds to that expense the daily gasoline consumption and taxi expenses to support three million miles of daily driving to and from the airport, that is, to and from Denver, the 6th dirtiest city in America.

  I’m sure he also has somewhere a realistic estimate of net savings attributable to an effective, safe, mass transit system from the city of Denver to DEN, as well as payback time. He’s already done the calculations for a 13-mile, 20-stop, rail line that would carry your car, with you in it ready to depart easily at any stop, between Stapleton and the Denver Federal Center. Without going into the details, he estimates an eight billion person-seconds a day savings in travel time alone. Eight billion person-seconds is 2,222,222 person-hours a day; if your time is worth $10 an hour, such a transit system would save over $22 million per day of the most precious resource we have, namely our own time. He’s not done the calculations, but they could be done, of the social benefits derived from 800 million plus hours annually spent reading to children, making art, music, and literature, working in gardens, or helping the less fortunate, all in the Denver area alone.

  Nobody’s going to rebuild Denver International Airport just to save 200 million gallons of jet fuel a year. The thing cost $2.2 billion in the first place, and the City of Denver and State of Colorado paid United Airlines $300 million to move its maintenance operation to Denver. And the new Denver airport was built with bonds financed through fuel taxes, landing and takeoff fees, and ticket surcharges. It’s always more expensive to fly in and out of Denver, than from anywhere else, to almost anywhere in the world. But it’s also sort of fun. DEN is a combination shopping mall and museum. A 1918 Curtis Jenny JN-4D hangs from the ceiling. This standard pilot trainer from WWI was powered by a liquid cooled V8 engine. On May 15, 1918, a similar airplane flew the first air mail between Washington, DC and New York. Down the concourse hangs an Alexander Eaglerock model A-14, one of Colorado’s own. The Alexander Airpl
ane Company built 893 Eaglerocks, first in Englewood, then in Colorado Springs, between 1926 and 1932. The family of Carl M. Williams gave this one—Number NC 205Y—to Denver in 1993 to “honor the pioneering spirit of the west during the Golden Era of aviation.” I wonder how much pioneering spirit it would have taken to build a 2% grade runway. Evidently too much.

  At the end of the B concourse I find a magnificent sunset. Three other people stare—silently—out across bleak, mid-March, prairie, toward snow-dusted mountains. The flight to Casper departs from B61; the one to Cheyenne has been cancelled. A century ago we took the stagecoach from Denver to Cheyenne, or rode our own large animal through early spring high plains weather. Stage runs must have been cancelled at times. A list of causes reads like a Western movie script: the unhappy remnants of Native America, weapons, dead horses, dangerous storms, bandits. But why would a flight to Cheyenne be cancelled at the end of Planet Earth’s most technological century? Computer glitch? Mechanical problems? Somebody run out of fuel?

  A pre-flight glance into any cockpit confirms that jet aircraft are complex machines. Norman Mailer, that most perceptive observer of our ventures into space, and Arthur Koestler, Europe’s deep, dark, chronicler of naiveté,