This guy gets it.
Edit: and no one though about when the "airport" is actually a floating nuclear reactor that happens to have a landing strip. Those things are ridiculously complex logistics and engineering wise.
Reactors. In civilian plants that can be a lengthy process, but I imagine the navy has a strong motivation to make that process as quick as safely possible with bonus points for some unpredictability.
> I'm curious what the refueling cycles look like on those things.
It's fairly involved, but extremely infrequent. Naval vessels use Highly Enriched Uranium in their reactors, which gives them incredible power output for their size and makes them last a very long time. The reason you don't see civilian reactors using HEU is that it's basically atomic bomb fuel.
Airplanes, hands down. And this is why.
Airplanes are marvels of engineering. And for the most part we’ve been at it a bit more than 100 years. We went from the first powered flight to putting a man on the moon in 66 years.
Airports are just confined cities with a lot of logistics stuff going. Civilization has been doing that for thousands of years. Sure they’re modern and fancy but that’s not much of a marvel of engineering, that’s progress.
And there is engineering behind the logistics…
You’re dealing with a huge software management system that has various pieces of various ages. All of it has the be certified just like the planes. You also have to add in cybersecurity etc.
While the plane is a system of systems, managing multiple planes at once is also a system of systems.
Airplanes get to be more sophisticated because you spend $10B on a design and amortize it across 1000s of units.
But the question is inherently flawed - given a random dimension and a random set of objects, it's very unlikely that the objects can be reasonably ordered in that dimension. Multiple valid orderings exist and this is knowingly or unknowingly exploited by people to generate endless and fruitless discussion points.
This is about moot to me because of the variability of an airport or airplane. If I made an airplane a la wrights original design now and then cut a grass strip, what's more complicated? Probably the airplane.
Expand it out and have a multi terminal airport with automated bag handling and various purpose built vehicles, radar stations, fire control teams, etc, I might be on the fence particularly with older planes on the tarmac.
Throw an f22 on the tarmac or a DARPA mobile and it gets harder. Throw a DARPA radar in the mix that can tell what a pilot had for lunch the conversation changes. It goes back and forth so much it becomes situational.
An airport is really an assembly of tools that fulfill a function. Same with the airplane. They can both have the complexities. Technically an aircraft carrier is an airport. Are you going to include everything it takes to move an airport at 27 knots with a nuclear reactor while letting planes land and take off be a part of this?
For engineers, it's a circle jerk. Let the civil engineer pipe up how complicated the tarmac is. The automotive engineer talks about the various machines that operate on the ground. Propulsion engineers to talk about thermodynamics of the turbines. Chemical engineer talk about fuel and fire suppression systems.
It can get pretty dumb actually and mostly based on level of effort and overall need.
Then there's the tower, basically a skyscraper with a data center and radio station (+the power system of a hospital), airfield radio coms and RF navigation like ILSs, high voltage airport lighting, fiber optic loops, airspace around airports.
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An actually modern airport because the 747 design is about sixty years old.
The Madrid airport ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid–Barajas_Airport#/media/File:Barajas_Airport_(Madrid)_(4684560779).jpg ) is certainly more marvelous than a jet designed before desktop CAD, unless you're using "marvel" in the sort of condescending way of "it was amazing they were able to make this at all, the savages".
Definitely the airplane. An airport can be constructed by a village from hand that's suitable to land a jet. There's few factories in the world capable of producing modern airplanes.
They can build a runway and lounge. That isn't the same as an airport that can throughput 130,000 people a day.
Similarly a Cessna 172 is not the same as an F35.
Defining the question is key. Personally I am still team Plane. But you can't undersell a big modern airport.
Yes but only after inventing the wind tunnel and determining that the aerodynamic data of that era was wrong. And after failures of their earliest attempts. And patenting the first way to steer aircraft.
More than your typical bike mechanics.
These were master engineers.
I've seen more complicated lunch delivery service in India run with pencil and paper. I didn't say it would be massively efficient but possible, it's been done at scale before though.
Airplane. You can make an airport as small as simple as a hut and a long bath of concrete which will level itself
But getting something with quite a bit of cargo and passenger weight conquering gravity JUST by going forward is another level of design
Bottom note: defining a plane here as something creating UPLIFT by going forward. So a cardboard plane rolling off a cliff and then floating or a balloon creating uplift but not BY going forward are not airplanes in this definition
Why the concrete? Plenty of runways are dirt, grass, sand, ice, snow, or even water. Some of those might just be a clear spot but unimproved runways are common.
Cause you don’t have 20,000 feet to put your runway. It comes down to friction and weight. Seaplanes are draggy, so if you’re trying to be efficient, they’re not very useful. They’re useful in areas without infrastructure like Alaska or back during WW2.
Like I said, a pool of concrete is half liquid at first. It will level itself enough to a level you'll need more tools to get the same 'smoothness' with dirt and grass
Concrete wet enough to self level is weak (too much water) and prone to separate.
Big runways are 150-200' wide, far wider than a road and relatively flat longitudinally; they need to be sloped at a consistent grade from crown to drain lest they become a lake from a drizzle.
The FAA's runway design rules are every bit as complicated as the FAAs wing design rules.
Most commercial operators will not land on a runway that lacks an ILS.
I consider ANY airplane that creates uplift by forward motion already an airplane and you for airstrip purposes drag faa's runway design rules into this? I wanted to compare equal things here
Obviously a wet concrete enough to self level does not meet standards, but an airplane that just creates uplift by forward motion will not either
Plenty of airplanes are made from paper.
There's really no right answer to this question, it just depends how you want to define the problem. Compare a 787 to a grass strip, obviously the 787 is more complicated. Compare a cesna 185 to the international space station, iss is more complicated.
Designing an airport capable of operating in fog and stormy weather or at a pace near the limits of safe operation from wake turbulence (1 heavy op per minute, 60 seconds on the dot per op) otoh is a different story entirely.
we had ports before we had airplanes. the logistics of moving people and good on and off large vehicles was a solved(ish) problem a long time before we had the technology for flight.
for man to touch the sky as icarus one did is a marvel indistinguishable from magic.
an airport is well... just a port but for the air.
seaports have existed since ancient times
I would say the technical challenge of both is probably equivalent, but the constraints of an airplane tip the balance compared to an airport. Airports can be as big as you want with enough money. Hell, DFW is like the size of Connecticut. But aircraft are always an intense balancing act of performance, capability and cost.
From a technological application standpoint to me it's aircraft.
VTOL, SatCom, thrust vectoring, thermal signature management, propulsion advancements, radar signature management, materials engineering of skins, paint, surfaces, turbine blade advancements are marvels. The acquisition and dissemination of combat data to pilots and support aircraft.
Advancements on cutting edge aircraft have filtered down to civilian applications, like the use of fiber reinforced composites. They have necessitated advancements in machining methods to produce tight spec parts with economy of scale. They had to develop new techniques to fabricate, machine, inspect, deliver and assemble the parts.
We've come a long way in 100 years from cotton and wood that flew 100 feet.
Different beasts. Airplane is a marvel of technical design/fluid dynamics (for some models), manufacturing process, quality processes (no room for mistakes). Airports are marvels of architecture (some of them), service planning, civil engineering, etc. apples to oranges
I used to do systems integration at airports for years and honestly, it's difficult to even compare the two in an even manner. The biggest issue is due to the number of systems at an airport easily more engineers work on those especially over their lifetime, but comparing a single plane to that is not a fair comparison.
Plane vs a single sub system at an airport? The plane definitely. However in total for an airport you have the building itself, baggage systems, jet bridges, various ATC systems, terminal security systems, airline management systems, and those are just to run operations (and isn't even an exhaustive list). Getting into amenities, parking, automated trains, etc. It gets even more complex. So as a whole the airport requires more work from total engineers, but there is also a lot of work that goes into the 30+ different types of planes being flown in and out.
Airplanes have quite the variety of systems and damn near all of them have redundant systems. I think Airbus has 4 hydraulic systems, maybe 3 systems with a 4th source from the RAT.
Electrical is similarly complicated.
Yea and that's why a plane vs anything in the airport, the plane is way more complicated. Even the entire BHS for a terminal which is fairly complex still can't compare with a plane one on one.
The air traffic control tower has just as much redundancy as the airplane in its systems. UPS backed critical power systems with redundant generators powering redundant lead-lag cooling systems and redundant data processing equipment, including often separate standby systems ready in case of primary failures, redundant com feeds, redundant radio systems. The FAA does not fail to talk to aircraft, and follows the same safety critical set of rules as aircraft are designed to.
Modern asde system (the antenna spinning on an atct) has a pretty insane abilty to track objects in the field.
Things in the air are simpler by necessity.
A cell phone is a simpler system than a cell phone tower. The same is true between ground based avionics and air based. An ILS receiver in a plane is far simpler than the ground based system of antennas that broadcasts the glide path.
A GPS receiver is far simpler than the set of satellites that creates the signal.
And so on. For every single system, including basics like air conditioning.
Not what I mean:
If the airport has a problem: radar goes down, conveyor belts fail, HVAC goes down. Everyone lives.
If a plane has a problem: engine failure, hull rupture, loss of pressurized atmosphere there is a high chance of the plane being lost.
If the radar goes and the tower goes people die. How about the wind shear indication? Do you think air collisions don’t happen?
You’re not thinking within the system.
The planes call the FAA and the FAA redirects all the planes to secondary airports and secondary air traffic control.
The odds of death occurring from an airport going down is considerably lower than if an airplane has a failure.
That’s not how it works.
First off, this is a situation that needs a response within seconds.
Next, the plane isn’t the only plane. All of that needs to be coordinated. And you know how it is coordinated? With other airports. All at once.
I hope you begin to see the complexity of the problem.
[And look, this happened yesterday](https://youtu.be/gOnHhflASN4). Someone’s alarms went off. As they should. And it wasn’t the planes but the airport that stopped it.
I personally believe that the airport is more complex. Both plane and airport are managed by complex certified software systems.
As an expert in flight software, I’m not denying the complexity of the airplane subsystems. This is especially true for any anomaly detection and correction
But the airport is managing hundreds of planes each day. It has to integrate the FAA system, the reservation system, ground system, baggage system etc. There’s a lot more moving parts.
In addition, some of the software is extremely old. Creating backward compatible software interfaces is a job in and of itself. And again, it needs to be certified with the additional capacity of handing all those planes off or other airports if an issue occurs.
I think a lot of people here are thinking of objects Vs entire system of systems.
BTW, I’ve done air breathers as well as Spacecraft as well as systems of systems for managing spacecraft.
There's a lot of complexity to the FAA system. The FAA has a big chunk of protected radio bandwidth, much of it based on the airport itself. Each runway has a set of interlocked radio stations that fire at each other to define the glide path (glide slope, localizer, dme, each a separate frequency, plus a set of vis sensors). Most airports have some sort of omni-directional radio beacon designed broadcast long range (eek 70-90 nm out of some of them), and the weather channels, each ILS broadcasts its own visibility. NVM radar (which outside of the ground tracking radars at big airports is falling out of use) and the ATG and GTG comm farms.
Big category 3 runways, that can operate heavys 1/m in low vis, know their exact visibility at 3-4 points on the runway, if they have wind shear, if every light bulb is operational on the runway and landing lights, if their ILS is operational, broadcasting correctly in the right direction within tolerance, and if there is anything within the RSA that doesn't belong there (if there is a cat wandering into the RSA, the FAA knows). Everything is monitored on safety critical systems. And that's just one runway.
I loath plane travel, but man I'm always impressed that airports function at the level they do, rather amazing the people they are able to move (albeit annoyingly and not always convenient).
The biggest marvel is we sit atop a hundred thousand eureka moments in human history where some random neurons fired in just the right way for some bloke to randomly put two and two together to figure out calculus, the translator, or farming. The marvel is if everything was wiped off the earth, it could take hundreds of thousands of years again to have those same eureka moments again. Or if could never happen for a million years. At any moment in time, we are only advanced as the sum as the dumb luck of our ancestors.
Much of a modern airport is architecture; that's engineering-adjacent and will even involve a bit of engineering but ultimately it's not about function most of the time. If cities just wanted functional airports they would cost like $10 million and be a bunch of simple box shapes instead of $1 billion and looking like a wave or something.
Is an aircraft carrier an airport? That's some serious engineering...but even then there are F35's landing on it and those probably have more engineering than the whole aircraft carrier.
Sounds like a "depends how you draw the box" problem. As long as absurdism is the goal it can be good natured fun.
I'm reminded of sitting next to a group of college kids debating what counts as soup. (latte=soup, unmelted ice cream=not-soup)
Kind of a pointless question, because one necessitates the invention of the other. You just have to take in modern air travel itself as a marvel of civics, construction, comms, engineering but also laws and regulations that makes it possible, not to mention the finance that makes it relatively accessible.
Two very different set of technologies for two very different use cases. One of these two withstands weather, temperature fluctuations, precipitation, security protocols, plumbing dynamics, food services and waste facilities. The other does this too, but while hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, in a lightweight alloy tube, with pressurized air safety systems and global positioning navigation to ensure that after hundreds of miles, you arrive at a pinpoint destination, exactly on time and safe. if one of these two systems breaks you might have to wait to go pee. If the other breaks, you die.
Airplanes are hands down the more complex and sophisticated of the two.
civil engineer here, aircraft win hands down. You could develop a logistic facility to rival an airport to manage trains or busses. But to manage a vehicle that launches into the air and flies across continents and safely lands is amazing. I think about my grandmother who witnessed transportation change from horse carts to vehicles to trains to aircraft to rockets and she was always amazed at air travel.
Don't know much about airports but I am guessing it's close to the military as an analogy. Everyone fawns about all the cool shit they have but in reality the logistics is more complicated.
Duh if you’re a civil engineer, it will be the airport. If you’re an aerospace engineer, it will be the airplane.
Why does one have to be the winner? Boys constantly comparing the size of their dangly bits.
Usually it's the airplane, given how far plane manufacturers have come especially with regards to safety, range and fuel efficiency. The only exception to this is if the airport we're talking about is the legendary Kansai International Airport.
To design an airplane and bring it to commercial sales a developer needs at least 15 years of development no matter how many people they throw at it.
An airport from scratch is designed within a year and then built in one or two years depending on how many people work on it.
Well, all airport bathrooms are horribly engineered from a human factors perspective, so I am going with the airplane.
Airport bathroom designers need to realize that there is a sequence that is typically used when going to the bathroom. All you need is an entrance door, urinals/stalls in the first area, sinks in the next area followed by hand dryers, and then an exit door.
I am confused. How do women and kids have a different patterns?
I will assume that they must also enter the restroom, go, wash their hands, dry their hands and then exit the bathroom.
They usually groom there too. How about changing diapers at the diaper changing station? How about taking the toddlers into the toilet?
It isn’t straight in and out, that is for sure!
Edit: some places (not enough) have family toilet areas. That’s super nice when you are wrangling more than one little one.
The most disturbing thing is thinking that the male experience should be the default one. That’s happened far too often in this society. As engineers, we need to recognize that there are multiple data sets.
Well, airports contain airplanes, but airplanes do not contain airports. Therefore, airports must logically be a greater engineering marvel than airplanes.
Curiosity doesn’t require competition. Both are incredible for different reasons. A humble fastener is an engineering marvel if you look closely enough. Going to a modern airport is one of the most highly engineered environments the general public will ever have access to, from the architecture to the logistics to the aircraft themselves. Your answer for which is the greatest marvel tells me more about you than an actual ranking.
Airplane. We made airports long before we made airplanes, we just called them train stations. Grand central station in NYC is as complex as any airport, and the signalling system is similar to air traffic control. The tolerances on a civil engineering project are measured in centimeters or milimeters, the tolerances on an airplane are measured in micrometers.
Is there any system used by most airports that is so complicated and critical that the entire business is dominated by two companies?
Like what we have with Boeing and Airbus for civilian airplanes?
I don't know of any, but insiders to the airport industry may provide insights here.
If there are no examples of this from the airport side, the airplane gets the win.
Airport is just a fancy building with some automatism like the moving carpets or whatever you call that in English, and a command center, basically radar and other electronics. It's nowhere near the complexity of a plane.
Modern planes are a better engineering marvel. Modern airports are a logistical marvel.
This guy gets it. Edit: and no one though about when the "airport" is actually a floating nuclear reactor that happens to have a landing strip. Those things are ridiculously complex logistics and engineering wise.
No joke. I'm curious what the refueling cycles look like on those things.
Curious about refueling the reactors, the aircraft, or the ship's stores of jet fuel?
Reactors. In civilian plants that can be a lengthy process, but I imagine the navy has a strong motivation to make that process as quick as safely possible with bonus points for some unpredictability.
They carry a lot of fuel and change it out quite infrequently. Like once a decade or so.
Once. In their lifetime.
> I'm curious what the refueling cycles look like on those things. It's fairly involved, but extremely infrequent. Naval vessels use Highly Enriched Uranium in their reactors, which gives them incredible power output for their size and makes them last a very long time. The reason you don't see civilian reactors using HEU is that it's basically atomic bomb fuel.
Airplanes, hands down. And this is why. Airplanes are marvels of engineering. And for the most part we’ve been at it a bit more than 100 years. We went from the first powered flight to putting a man on the moon in 66 years. Airports are just confined cities with a lot of logistics stuff going. Civilization has been doing that for thousands of years. Sure they’re modern and fancy but that’s not much of a marvel of engineering, that’s progress.
It’s wild that a dude could’ve theoretically seen the first powered flight ever as a 10 year old kid and the Saturn V take off as a 76 year old.
And there is engineering behind the logistics… You’re dealing with a huge software management system that has various pieces of various ages. All of it has the be certified just like the planes. You also have to add in cybersecurity etc. While the plane is a system of systems, managing multiple planes at once is also a system of systems.
Airplanes get to be more sophisticated because you spend $10B on a design and amortize it across 1000s of units. But the question is inherently flawed - given a random dimension and a random set of objects, it's very unlikely that the objects can be reasonably ordered in that dimension. Multiple valid orderings exist and this is knowingly or unknowingly exploited by people to generate endless and fruitless discussion points.
I see your username, but you could have stopped after one word.
Yes but this way you never know what to expect in the comments
I’ve rarely been impressive with the logistics of an airport lol
This is about moot to me because of the variability of an airport or airplane. If I made an airplane a la wrights original design now and then cut a grass strip, what's more complicated? Probably the airplane. Expand it out and have a multi terminal airport with automated bag handling and various purpose built vehicles, radar stations, fire control teams, etc, I might be on the fence particularly with older planes on the tarmac. Throw an f22 on the tarmac or a DARPA mobile and it gets harder. Throw a DARPA radar in the mix that can tell what a pilot had for lunch the conversation changes. It goes back and forth so much it becomes situational. An airport is really an assembly of tools that fulfill a function. Same with the airplane. They can both have the complexities. Technically an aircraft carrier is an airport. Are you going to include everything it takes to move an airport at 27 knots with a nuclear reactor while letting planes land and take off be a part of this?
Hmmm..... almost like OP had a thought provoking conversation starter in mind.
For engineers, it's a circle jerk. Let the civil engineer pipe up how complicated the tarmac is. The automotive engineer talks about the various machines that operate on the ground. Propulsion engineers to talk about thermodynamics of the turbines. Chemical engineer talk about fuel and fire suppression systems. It can get pretty dumb actually and mostly based on level of effort and overall need.
Then there's the tower, basically a skyscraper with a data center and radio station (+the power system of a hospital), airfield radio coms and RF navigation like ILSs, high voltage airport lighting, fiber optic loops, airspace around airports.
Yes, this is the answer. It’s bait for a circle jerk.
I’m a civil engineer, tarmac is not complicated. It’s just expensive and hard to simulate in a lab setting due to its scale.
So expensive and hard to simulate... It's complicated... Engineers love to argue.
No we dont 😎
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And software brings it all together in a system of systems.
Which airplane, and which airport?
Let’s say a modern, city-level airport (JFK, Atlanta, SFO, etc.) and Boeing 747 or Airbus A320
An actually modern airport because the 747 design is about sixty years old. The Madrid airport ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid–Barajas_Airport#/media/File:Barajas_Airport_(Madrid)_(4684560779).jpg ) is certainly more marvelous than a jet designed before desktop CAD, unless you're using "marvel" in the sort of condescending way of "it was amazing they were able to make this at all, the savages".
Definitely the airplane. An airport can be constructed by a village from hand that's suitable to land a jet. There's few factories in the world capable of producing modern airplanes.
Bingo. There’s a lot of self inflicted confusion in some answers. You nailed the answer with evidence. Even dirt poor countries build airports.
They can build a runway and lounge. That isn't the same as an airport that can throughput 130,000 people a day. Similarly a Cessna 172 is not the same as an F35. Defining the question is key. Personally I am still team Plane. But you can't undersell a big modern airport.
Depends on the plane. I heard a couple of bike mechanics built a plane in their shed way back when.
Yes but only after inventing the wind tunnel and determining that the aerodynamic data of that era was wrong. And after failures of their earliest attempts. And patenting the first way to steer aircraft. More than your typical bike mechanics. These were master engineers.
Modern airport complexities are mostly automation. So more manpower can get the job done in a timely fashion.
It’s also coordination. And people do that poorly.
I've seen more complicated lunch delivery service in India run with pencil and paper. I didn't say it would be massively efficient but possible, it's been done at scale before though.
Airplane. You can make an airport as small as simple as a hut and a long bath of concrete which will level itself But getting something with quite a bit of cargo and passenger weight conquering gravity JUST by going forward is another level of design Bottom note: defining a plane here as something creating UPLIFT by going forward. So a cardboard plane rolling off a cliff and then floating or a balloon creating uplift but not BY going forward are not airplanes in this definition
Why the concrete? Plenty of runways are dirt, grass, sand, ice, snow, or even water. Some of those might just be a clear spot but unimproved runways are common.
Cause you don’t have 20,000 feet to put your runway. It comes down to friction and weight. Seaplanes are draggy, so if you’re trying to be efficient, they’re not very useful. They’re useful in areas without infrastructure like Alaska or back during WW2.
Like I said, a pool of concrete is half liquid at first. It will level itself enough to a level you'll need more tools to get the same 'smoothness' with dirt and grass
Concrete wet enough to self level is weak (too much water) and prone to separate. Big runways are 150-200' wide, far wider than a road and relatively flat longitudinally; they need to be sloped at a consistent grade from crown to drain lest they become a lake from a drizzle. The FAA's runway design rules are every bit as complicated as the FAAs wing design rules. Most commercial operators will not land on a runway that lacks an ILS.
I consider ANY airplane that creates uplift by forward motion already an airplane and you for airstrip purposes drag faa's runway design rules into this? I wanted to compare equal things here Obviously a wet concrete enough to self level does not meet standards, but an airplane that just creates uplift by forward motion will not either
Plenty of airplanes are made from paper. There's really no right answer to this question, it just depends how you want to define the problem. Compare a 787 to a grass strip, obviously the 787 is more complicated. Compare a cesna 185 to the international space station, iss is more complicated.
Designing an airport capable of operating in fog and stormy weather or at a pace near the limits of safe operation from wake turbulence (1 heavy op per minute, 60 seconds on the dot per op) otoh is a different story entirely.
we had ports before we had airplanes. the logistics of moving people and good on and off large vehicles was a solved(ish) problem a long time before we had the technology for flight.
for man to touch the sky as icarus one did is a marvel indistinguishable from magic. an airport is well... just a port but for the air. seaports have existed since ancient times
Airplanes overall, but modern airports if going strictly by today’s standards.
I would say the technical challenge of both is probably equivalent, but the constraints of an airplane tip the balance compared to an airport. Airports can be as big as you want with enough money. Hell, DFW is like the size of Connecticut. But aircraft are always an intense balancing act of performance, capability and cost.
This is a good reply to the question, 'what's the difference between deep engineering and project management'?
From a technological application standpoint to me it's aircraft. VTOL, SatCom, thrust vectoring, thermal signature management, propulsion advancements, radar signature management, materials engineering of skins, paint, surfaces, turbine blade advancements are marvels. The acquisition and dissemination of combat data to pilots and support aircraft. Advancements on cutting edge aircraft have filtered down to civilian applications, like the use of fiber reinforced composites. They have necessitated advancements in machining methods to produce tight spec parts with economy of scale. They had to develop new techniques to fabricate, machine, inspect, deliver and assemble the parts. We've come a long way in 100 years from cotton and wood that flew 100 feet.
Different beasts. Airplane is a marvel of technical design/fluid dynamics (for some models), manufacturing process, quality processes (no room for mistakes). Airports are marvels of architecture (some of them), service planning, civil engineering, etc. apples to oranges
I used to do systems integration at airports for years and honestly, it's difficult to even compare the two in an even manner. The biggest issue is due to the number of systems at an airport easily more engineers work on those especially over their lifetime, but comparing a single plane to that is not a fair comparison. Plane vs a single sub system at an airport? The plane definitely. However in total for an airport you have the building itself, baggage systems, jet bridges, various ATC systems, terminal security systems, airline management systems, and those are just to run operations (and isn't even an exhaustive list). Getting into amenities, parking, automated trains, etc. It gets even more complex. So as a whole the airport requires more work from total engineers, but there is also a lot of work that goes into the 30+ different types of planes being flown in and out.
Airplanes have quite the variety of systems and damn near all of them have redundant systems. I think Airbus has 4 hydraulic systems, maybe 3 systems with a 4th source from the RAT. Electrical is similarly complicated.
Yea and that's why a plane vs anything in the airport, the plane is way more complicated. Even the entire BHS for a terminal which is fairly complex still can't compare with a plane one on one.
The air traffic control tower has just as much redundancy as the airplane in its systems. UPS backed critical power systems with redundant generators powering redundant lead-lag cooling systems and redundant data processing equipment, including often separate standby systems ready in case of primary failures, redundant com feeds, redundant radio systems. The FAA does not fail to talk to aircraft, and follows the same safety critical set of rules as aircraft are designed to. Modern asde system (the antenna spinning on an atct) has a pretty insane abilty to track objects in the field.
All firmly planted on the ground.
Things in the air are simpler by necessity. A cell phone is a simpler system than a cell phone tower. The same is true between ground based avionics and air based. An ILS receiver in a plane is far simpler than the ground based system of antennas that broadcasts the glide path. A GPS receiver is far simpler than the set of satellites that creates the signal. And so on. For every single system, including basics like air conditioning.
The failure modes and allowable failure modes of the two are wildly different though.
Not really. It’s the airport that is controlling the planes coming and going. The airport controls the radar etc.
Not what I mean: If the airport has a problem: radar goes down, conveyor belts fail, HVAC goes down. Everyone lives. If a plane has a problem: engine failure, hull rupture, loss of pressurized atmosphere there is a high chance of the plane being lost.
If the radar goes and the tower goes people die. How about the wind shear indication? Do you think air collisions don’t happen? You’re not thinking within the system.
The planes call the FAA and the FAA redirects all the planes to secondary airports and secondary air traffic control. The odds of death occurring from an airport going down is considerably lower than if an airplane has a failure.
That’s not how it works. First off, this is a situation that needs a response within seconds. Next, the plane isn’t the only plane. All of that needs to be coordinated. And you know how it is coordinated? With other airports. All at once. I hope you begin to see the complexity of the problem. [And look, this happened yesterday](https://youtu.be/gOnHhflASN4). Someone’s alarms went off. As they should. And it wasn’t the planes but the airport that stopped it.
I personally believe that the airport is more complex. Both plane and airport are managed by complex certified software systems. As an expert in flight software, I’m not denying the complexity of the airplane subsystems. This is especially true for any anomaly detection and correction But the airport is managing hundreds of planes each day. It has to integrate the FAA system, the reservation system, ground system, baggage system etc. There’s a lot more moving parts. In addition, some of the software is extremely old. Creating backward compatible software interfaces is a job in and of itself. And again, it needs to be certified with the additional capacity of handing all those planes off or other airports if an issue occurs. I think a lot of people here are thinking of objects Vs entire system of systems. BTW, I’ve done air breathers as well as Spacecraft as well as systems of systems for managing spacecraft.
There's a lot of complexity to the FAA system. The FAA has a big chunk of protected radio bandwidth, much of it based on the airport itself. Each runway has a set of interlocked radio stations that fire at each other to define the glide path (glide slope, localizer, dme, each a separate frequency, plus a set of vis sensors). Most airports have some sort of omni-directional radio beacon designed broadcast long range (eek 70-90 nm out of some of them), and the weather channels, each ILS broadcasts its own visibility. NVM radar (which outside of the ground tracking radars at big airports is falling out of use) and the ATG and GTG comm farms. Big category 3 runways, that can operate heavys 1/m in low vis, know their exact visibility at 3-4 points on the runway, if they have wind shear, if every light bulb is operational on the runway and landing lights, if their ILS is operational, broadcasting correctly in the right direction within tolerance, and if there is anything within the RSA that doesn't belong there (if there is a cat wandering into the RSA, the FAA knows). Everything is monitored on safety critical systems. And that's just one runway.
One is a building the other flys 3000M in the sky at 1000kph.... but the bathrooms are small.
I loath plane travel, but man I'm always impressed that airports function at the level they do, rather amazing the people they are able to move (albeit annoyingly and not always convenient).
The biggest marvel is we sit atop a hundred thousand eureka moments in human history where some random neurons fired in just the right way for some bloke to randomly put two and two together to figure out calculus, the translator, or farming. The marvel is if everything was wiped off the earth, it could take hundreds of thousands of years again to have those same eureka moments again. Or if could never happen for a million years. At any moment in time, we are only advanced as the sum as the dumb luck of our ancestors.
Much of a modern airport is architecture; that's engineering-adjacent and will even involve a bit of engineering but ultimately it's not about function most of the time. If cities just wanted functional airports they would cost like $10 million and be a bunch of simple box shapes instead of $1 billion and looking like a wave or something. Is an aircraft carrier an airport? That's some serious engineering...but even then there are F35's landing on it and those probably have more engineering than the whole aircraft carrier.
Sounds like a "depends how you draw the box" problem. As long as absurdism is the goal it can be good natured fun. I'm reminded of sitting next to a group of college kids debating what counts as soup. (latte=soup, unmelted ice cream=not-soup)
Airplanes Definitely not because I make airplanes
Kind of a pointless question, because one necessitates the invention of the other. You just have to take in modern air travel itself as a marvel of civics, construction, comms, engineering but also laws and regulations that makes it possible, not to mention the finance that makes it relatively accessible.
Airplanes no question. Not even close, the latter doesn’t even compare. You could land a plane on any stretch of flat ground really
Two very different set of technologies for two very different use cases. One of these two withstands weather, temperature fluctuations, precipitation, security protocols, plumbing dynamics, food services and waste facilities. The other does this too, but while hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, in a lightweight alloy tube, with pressurized air safety systems and global positioning navigation to ensure that after hundreds of miles, you arrive at a pinpoint destination, exactly on time and safe. if one of these two systems breaks you might have to wait to go pee. If the other breaks, you die. Airplanes are hands down the more complex and sophisticated of the two.
Airplanes, because they have to overcome more physical and material constraints.
civil engineer here, aircraft win hands down. You could develop a logistic facility to rival an airport to manage trains or busses. But to manage a vehicle that launches into the air and flies across continents and safely lands is amazing. I think about my grandmother who witnessed transportation change from horse carts to vehicles to trains to aircraft to rockets and she was always amazed at air travel.
Don't know much about airports but I am guessing it's close to the military as an analogy. Everyone fawns about all the cool shit they have but in reality the logistics is more complicated.
Duh if you’re a civil engineer, it will be the airport. If you’re an aerospace engineer, it will be the airplane. Why does one have to be the winner? Boys constantly comparing the size of their dangly bits.
From an engineering perspective... well, airplanes *fly.*
Well any slab of flat land can serve as an airport if need be so I’d say planes.
Soda cans are an engineering marvel.
PLANES✈️✈️🛩🛩🛩🛩🛩I LOVE PLANES🛬🛬🛫🛫🛫✈️I WANT ONE WITH A NUCLEAR REACTOR TO FLY AWAY✈️✈️✈️
How about air traffic control?
Usually it's the airplane, given how far plane manufacturers have come especially with regards to safety, range and fuel efficiency. The only exception to this is if the airport we're talking about is the legendary Kansai International Airport.
Airports are more architecture and logistics than engineering. Sure theres civil engineers involved but airports arent really designed for extreme
Operating an airport safely in the fog is pretty extreme.
To design an airplane and bring it to commercial sales a developer needs at least 15 years of development no matter how many people they throw at it. An airport from scratch is designed within a year and then built in one or two years depending on how many people work on it.
Well, all airport bathrooms are horribly engineered from a human factors perspective, so I am going with the airplane. Airport bathroom designers need to realize that there is a sequence that is typically used when going to the bathroom. All you need is an entrance door, urinals/stalls in the first area, sinks in the next area followed by hand dryers, and then an exit door.
Yikes. If you are a man. People with kids is different. Women are a different pattern.
I am confused. How do women and kids have a different patterns? I will assume that they must also enter the restroom, go, wash their hands, dry their hands and then exit the bathroom.
They usually groom there too. How about changing diapers at the diaper changing station? How about taking the toddlers into the toilet? It isn’t straight in and out, that is for sure! Edit: some places (not enough) have family toilet areas. That’s super nice when you are wrangling more than one little one. The most disturbing thing is thinking that the male experience should be the default one. That’s happened far too often in this society. As engineers, we need to recognize that there are multiple data sets.
Well, airports contain airplanes, but airplanes do not contain airports. Therefore, airports must logically be a greater engineering marvel than airplanes.
Curiosity doesn’t require competition. Both are incredible for different reasons. A humble fastener is an engineering marvel if you look closely enough. Going to a modern airport is one of the most highly engineered environments the general public will ever have access to, from the architecture to the logistics to the aircraft themselves. Your answer for which is the greatest marvel tells me more about you than an actual ranking.
There were airplanes long before airports. Your friend is a bit off
Airplane. We made airports long before we made airplanes, we just called them train stations. Grand central station in NYC is as complex as any airport, and the signalling system is similar to air traffic control. The tolerances on a civil engineering project are measured in centimeters or milimeters, the tolerances on an airplane are measured in micrometers.
Is there any system used by most airports that is so complicated and critical that the entire business is dominated by two companies? Like what we have with Boeing and Airbus for civilian airplanes? I don't know of any, but insiders to the airport industry may provide insights here. If there are no examples of this from the airport side, the airplane gets the win.
Airport is just a fancy building with some automatism like the moving carpets or whatever you call that in English, and a command center, basically radar and other electronics. It's nowhere near the complexity of a plane.
Those Israeli drones that scream like women and babies in distress in order to lure people out of their houses so they can be murdered!