EDITORIAL

The ‘plane’ truth

Posted 10/2/14

We recently got to see a somewhat restored print of the classic science fiction film Metropolis by German director Fritz Lang. The film was made in 1927 and it was Lang and his writers’ vision of …

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EDITORIAL

The ‘plane’ truth

Posted

We recently got to see a somewhat restored print of the classic science fiction film Metropolis by German director Fritz Lang. The film was made in 1927 and it was Lang and his writers’ vision of what the world would look like 100 years after the film was made. Aside from the totally illogical “message” of the film, which was that all progress was bad, the basic vision was that the city of the future was going to be straight up. Everyone would live in tall buildings clustered around a central, urban area, they thought. Skyscrapers in New York and other cities seemed to have led them into a false perception of how growth occurs.

As it turned out, the cities of the future didn’t go up; they spread out. There have been some truly freakishly tall buildings going up in other parts of the world, but America, for the most part, decided going sideways was the way to go. There are very few skyscrapers going up in America, and the scenes in Metropolis of air travel are particularly naïve. Their planes of the future bear an uncanny resemblance to their airplanes of their own time and seem to reflect none of the technological and aeronautical sophistication of the real city of the future. Which is especially puzzling because there are no helicopters or other designs capable of hovering in Metropolis, and the writers seem to have stopped short of explaining where the pilots of that world would land their planes.

What they didn’t realize is that it takes space to take off and land, and most airplanes still require more room to take off than the moviemakers of the 1920s imagined. All this is to remind us that airplanes are here to stay.

Designing aircraft that can take off vertically is an expense even the richest societies can’t afford. Imagine the fuel necessary for that technology!

Unfortunately, we will continue to rely on aircraft that need runways to take off and land until we come up with a cleaner and cheaper way to power air travel. That genie, as they say, is out of the bottle and it’s not going back.

Which is why the complications that arise when a community attempts to make common cause with an airport in their midst, it doesn’t help to make opposition so unreasonable that no progress is made.

Warwick puts up with a lot by having an airport right in the middle of everything. There are very few cities that have an airport smack dab in the middle of town, but that’s what we have and that’s what we have to deal with.

There are many people who have valid concerns about what the growth of T.F. Green will do to the city but seems to be a few who will never be satisfied with any compromise or accommodation made with RIAC.

It makes sense for the city to get as much as they can for the inconvenience of living so intimately with noisy, smelly airplanes and having a vast area in the middle of town that has to be driven around and factored into any movement we want to make in our metropolis.

When T.F. Green was built, no one imagined that settlement that started in Providence was going to go sideways so fast. The city was being settled faster than thinking about the future occurred. Those who built the airport had no idea how totally our society would come to depend on air travel, or what was needed to accommodate it. They just knew it was coming.

We should be very careful about how we allow the airport to grow, but it is far too late to think it won’t grow at all. Just stubbornly resisting everything just for the sake of resisting everything is a waste of everyone’s time.

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    Travel out of TF green has been down month over month this year vs last year. We didn't and we don't need a larger airport polluting our environment and our children in the middle of a residential city. We need political greed to cease to exist in RI. RI is losing its population, not gaining. People aren't moving sideways, they are moving OUT. Warwick's population is declining year over year and it continues to decline---just like travel out of TF Green. What a waste of time and money is the airport expansion, while ruining the quality of life for so many Warwick families. Waste of time and money = RIAC, and the Warwick City council made a HUGE MISTAKE.

    Monday, October 6, 2014 Report this