Obviously the people which live in the background won’t be happy about that…

Didnt they film the Balrog scene under there?

Those are 50 very long feet…

I’d hate to lock up a brake and go off the side…

beautiful… lots of columns, like ancient Greece.

So someone with a car bomb can make a mess of that runway as a plane is landing??

hey i have an idea! lets build a runway on the beach!

“Obviously the people which live in the background won’t be happy about that…”

Yeah, what with them being the ones who are going to be using the airport and not sliding off the end. I bet they HATE that!

Nice to see something we got here in portugal is aprecciated on a global scale, never saw the airport, it was made in a island i never went, but from what i know it was very useful to the region, allowing it to accelerate growth a lot.

I have landed at that airport twice, beautiful island. They also have some of the best tunneling technology in the world and have built tunnels through mountains several kilometers long. Amazing place.

yeah dont be mean. its really cool!

lawl. That last one would have a few tweaked out people going to their car and start freaking out and getting paranoid because of the loud sound of planes coming in.

gotta be stronger than the beach!

I think it would be much more safer and more stable if it had less but thicker pillars.

> I think it would be much more safer and more stable if it had less but thicker pillars.

Less but thicker pillars?

Are you mental?

This also supports the surface better. The biggest concern if a hard landing cracking the surface and the plane ’sinking’ below the surface and getting sheered.

I’m not sure where the 70m pillar height came from (let alone the 50-ft one stated previously!) My colleagues worked on this project a few years ago, and my information was that the runway is 60m above sea level, with up to a 15m depth of land below the runway created by reclaiming it from the sea. That makes them about 50m tall, although note that in some cases their foundations extend another 50m below ground!

As for the column thickness, they’re already 3m thick, which is fairly robust!

thats simply amazing

Since when is Portugal an Island you imbecile?

wow, this is really big

This airport upgrade received the best engineering work prize some yaers ago when it was finished.
I’ve landed in that airport and even with the extension the experience can be very “amuzing”.
It was a great develpment to Madeira Island though.
Btw, I am portuguese, and Madeira Island is one of the best places in our country. Maybe you know the Algarve.
Visit us and enjoy!
Take care.

it is well designed, don´t worry.

BTW, you need a special licencese (that only air portugal’s pilots have) to take land on it.

I have also landed on that airport, and driven throw the highway that goes between the columns and under the landing strip. It‘s an amazing island, definetly worth visiting.

“I think it would be much more safer and more stable if it had less but thicker pillars.”

You have to think of it in surface area and weight distribution. If you were just trying to balance the runway on top, fewer, larger pillars would do the trick. But they have to support massive weight and the impact of landing planes!
In that situation, you need surface area support as concentrated as possible.
Well known in engineering that multiple smaller pillars are used for bridges and anything that supports massive weight.
If you’re using columns to support a roof or something that won’t be bearing a massive continual weight load, fewer ones will do with a larger circumference. that’s the difference.

Under the bridge area must be secured. I wonder why they would let the cars in there. Huge security issue as someone mentioned above.

There’s no way that parking lot would be allowed to be there if this was in the USA.

Think about it like a bed of nails. If you have too few nails and you put a heavy person on it, it’s going to hurt. More nails, less pressure on any given nail.

I love how everyone in here is a certified engineer and knows what kind of pillars it should’ve been made with…

That’s an amazing structural feat but it has terrorist attack written all over it. They placed the parking lot in a very bad place, it should have been made a secured area with guards. All they need is a few well placed car bombs to take out the runway and any planes that are landing. And no, not just the US is under threat of attacks.

“There’s no way that parking lot would be allowed to be there if this was in the USA.”

It was only during a special event of electronic music, asshole.

I like the engineering aspect of it all, but it seems fill dirt would have been a hell of a lot cheaper. Seeing as how it is a small island, they probably dont have that much to spare in that respect.

ohh and…@Otif
The Atlanta bombing was just ‘a special olyimpic event’……You arrogant douche nozzle. While we are at it… they were just a couple of neatly matching highrises.

It’s amazing! I do hope it’s shock proof though.

Funchal, Madeira in Portugal is an island, 980km away from Lisbon, capital of Portugal, they have a port and an airport, so the chances of a car-bomb beeing imported to the island without control is very slym.
The only threath would be within, maybe a local.
As the locals are very pacific (as all the portuguese), thats very unlikly, plus, Madeira has a fascist regional administration, so you dont see much foreign ppl (excluding tourists).

Its a shame that we live in a world where something as amazing as this gives someone the thought of, “WOW thats a terrorist attack waiting to happen!”

I feel bad for our children, i hope it gets better!

bet they’d used pillars at the ponto delgada airport as well if they could, but they filled it up instead, lots of earth and gravel… i assume the us army did, theyve had an airforce base there since ww2 or something…

“up to a 15m depth of land below the runway created by reclaiming it from the sea.” posted by Brian | 31st of January, 2008, 1:16 am

I have heard of other instances of reclaimed land subsiding. Could that possibly happen here?

That looks like a giant domino. All it takes is one to fall, and the rest will follow.
Plus, it spoils the view on the beach.

The Oklahoma City building fell because the blast was contained by the structure of the building to take out multiple support structures. The space under that runway is open. A three-meter thick pillar would likely hold up to a pretty huge blast, and even if you got one, there wouldn’t be any pressure buildup under there to take multiple columns down.

And dominos are not round. All it would take, I guess, would be for the equivalent of a pool shot on a really long table, where a person hit one ball into the next, and the next, and the next, down a straight line, centered each time well enough to maintain the chain reaction. Not bloody likely. One might be able to bring down the first section of it by crashing a large plane straight into it. Multiple planes could even topple the whole thing. Then subsequent flights would have nowhere to land, and would have to crash. Some people should stay on the ground.

It is very sad that they polluted the waterfront with this runway.
It would have been a nice park.

I think this structure is pretty strong. The pillars are going to hold the mass, but I think the top leyer will need a maintanance once in while.

“It is very sad that they polluted the waterfront with this runway.”

Yeah, how sad, ruining a view… far more sad than the 131 people that died when a plane crashed here because the runway was too short before the extension….

Even a small level of earthquake can cause a lot of destruction here.Pillars must not be used as this purpose.Something else could be done.

I’m sure the real engineers that built the thing didn’t think up any of these things first… I mean, really, folks. Come on.