San Diego desperately needs a new airport. It has needed one for years. The existing facility, San Diego International, is crowded onto a puny 675 acre parcel. That’s a lovely size for a horse farm, but it’s infinitesimal for an airport serving a metropolitan area of 3 million people. All of San Diego shares a single runway–the busiest in the country and also one of the most dangerous.
So freaking build a new airport already, you say. To their credit, the fine people of southern Southern California have expressed a desire to do just that. They’ve had commissions and referendums and so forth. But the problem boils down to the fact there’s nowhere to put a new airport, except for a local Marine base. But San Diegans voted overwhelmingly in 2006 not to build an new airport on the Marine land, both because they didn’t want to see the military depart and because of noise concerns.
In the midst of this pickle, along comes a fellow named Adam Englund. He’s a local lawyer who studied international law at Cambridge and has long nurtured a fascination with the idea of floating cities. He’s got an idea–a $20 billion business plan, even.
It’s so incredibly simple, says Englund. We live next to all this open, watery space. Let’s put the airport… in the ocean.
