Application of Computers to Airport Planning and Design

The digital computer can facilitate examination of airport design alternatives. In the airport planning process, many procedures lend themselves to the use of computers, which include determinations of airspace capacities; analyses of alternative sites; determination of optimum airfield layouts based on digitized terrain models; derivations of space requirements for different terminal systems, and passenger and baggage flows for air terminals. Stress programs, for example, are particularly useful in the design of complex hangar structures. Similar to highway design programs, the computation of earthwork quantities in airfield design by the use of the computer, and the plotting of the cross sections, virtually eliminates the arithmetical errors which plague these calculations when done by hand. Other uses of the computer in airport design are in computing flows in water, sewage, air conditioning and electrical systems.