Ask the pilot

San Diego "International" goes runway to runway against Logan, but the pilot stays in his hometown's corner.

By Patrick Smith

Jun 25, 2004 | On the heels of my semi-nostalgic paean to Boston's Logan Airport came several protests. At issue was my declaration of Logan as the closest to a city center of any major international airfield. Logan's southern boundary -- the granite seawalls along runways 04L and 04R, and a wide swath of landfill called Bird Island Flats -- rests about two miles from the rooftops of the city's financial district.

Key to my assertion were the words "major" and "international," vague as those qualifiers might be. To those of you with a sentimental attachment to San Diego International, aka Lindbergh Field, I appreciate the letters but I'm not backing down. Lindbergh is indeed an inexpensive taxi ride from the heart of San Diego (about the same two miles, Rand McNally tells us), but with half as many visitors as Boston, most of them traveling domestically, the comparison isn't fair.

I'll put SAN into the same category as Washington National (I still can't say "Reagan"), La Guardia, and maybe Chicago Midway. All are nestled tightly -- some would say perilously -- in urban areas, but are restricted to a chiefly domestic clientele embarking on short- or medium-haul operations. To compare: among the liveries rising above Logan's Terminal E are those of Lufthansa, Aer Lingus, British Airways, Swiss, Alitalia, Icelandair, Virgin Atlantic, Air Jamaica and Air France. For a while we had Korean Air. Before the attacks of 2001, British Airways was departing thrice daily to London, and American was on the verge of launching the first-ever nonstops between Logan and Tokyo.

And no, by the way, there's no regulatory criterion for the use of "international," though a single trans-border service seems to go to the heads of airport authorities. In Fargo, N.D., one finds Hector International Airport, though I doubt you'll encounter anything more exotic than a commuter jet or two arriving from Winnipeg. To pick on San Diego again, which also claims the suffix, a scan of its 18 resident airlines reveals that only AeroMexico wears a foreign flag.

Writing from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, Salon subscriber Ari Katz reminds me that the Tashkent airport, recently overhauled by the same contractors who helped build Kuala Lumpur's gleaming new terminal, is only six miles from the city center. This fact is confirmed by my Uzbekistan Airways timetable (three times weekly to JFK, by the way). The airline also notes in its description of the country's points of interest "colourful fabrics, exotic fruits, and endless desserts with caravans of camels."

I can't speak for the Uzbeks (and who am I to criticize their dining habits?), but I take it the residents of San Diego live in the shadow of Los Angeles much the way Bostonians bow to the dominance of New York. Since I'm feeling your pain, I'll go ahead and mention that Lindbergh is, if nothing else, "a city-centric, sparkling gateway to America's Finest City." Unfortunately I have no idea what that means, and in the interest of full disclosure I've never been to San Diego, but it's a quote from a local Web page, where you also learn that SAN is the nation's busiest single-runway commercial airport.

Judging the prowess of an airport by its runways, or lack thereof, is sometimes tricky, length and placement taking precedence over number. London-Gatwick sees 70 airlines and 30 million passengers a year with only a single strip. Boston handles roughly two-thirds those numbers with five. Tokyo-Narita, one of the world's busiest ports of call, operated for many years before a second runway was opened, while Osaka's Kansai International was completed in 1994 with only one. One meaning two, of course, as each individual strip is bidirectional (something we covered here months ago), but let's keep it simple. Each lay of pavement is, for the purposes of our discussion, a single runway.

Although short runways aren't hazardous, strictly speaking -- planes will adjust the payload to ensure that regulatory (distance) parameters are met -- they can entail weight restrictions and other logistical snags, especially during inclement weather. At National and La Guardia, the longest stretch of asphalt is only about 7,000 feet, prohibiting the use of fuel-laden widebodies heading long distances.

Runway alignment also goes a long way toward how efficiently an airport handles flights. Nowhere illustrates this better than my hometown field, Boston-Logan. Allow me to borrow from an opinion piece I authored for the Boston Globe several years ago...

Next Page: Runway confusion continues

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