Classroom clipper, Vol. I, No. 3, December 1944

              CLASSROOM CUPPER
December, 1944	Published by PAN AMERICAN WORLD AIRWAYS	Vol. I No. 3
NEW IDLEWILD AIRPORT FOR PLANE A MINUTE SERVICE
WILL HAVE SIX RUNWAYS 6,000 TO 10,000 FEET LONG
Photo by courtesy Airports
IDLEWILD AIRPORT—This photograph of a three-dimensional model shows the $7,500,000 Administration Building, three hangar groups and (lower left) a tank farm for gasoline and oil. The seaplane base is at lower right.
New York City Needs New Airport Because LaGuardia Field Has Been Outgrown
Of all the airports under construction or planned for post-war, that being built by the City of New York on a 4,057-acre tract abutting Jamaica Bay is the most elaborate.
This field, to be opened to the heaviest of the new transports in the autumn of 1945, is a “must” for the nation’s biggest metropolis. New York simply has outgrown its “modern” airport, LaGuardia Field, opened as recently as March, 1940. LaGuardia, western terminus of Pan American Airways Atlantic Division Clippers, is “bursting at the seams.”
An airport is rated on its ability to handle traffic. The Jamaica Bay project, called Idlewild, will have six runways in the beginning. Two of them will be 10,000 feet long, and the other four will be 8,200 feet, 7,500, 6,500 and 6,000. Each will have a width of 200 feet.
They will handle two planes at a time, or takeoffs and landings at the rate of about one a minute. The long-range plan for Idlewild encompasses the construction of twelve such runways, which will double its capacity. In other words landings and takeoffs when the project is complete can be made at the rate of 240 an hour or a theoretical total of 5,760 each 24 hours.
The runways of extra length will be constructed, of course, to accommodate such mammoth transports as those being acquired by Pan American World Airways for its overseas routes. To carry up to 150 passengers a plane must have size and weight, as well as power. The combination of the three dictates the use of extended paved surface areas for takeoffs and landings.
It is anticipated that by laying the runways on steel forms a foot deep they will be able to take the future’s giant airliners weighing up to 300,000 pounds. The largest planes now operating from land weigh less than 100,000 pounds.
The runways alone, it is estimated,
will cost a minimum of $30,000,000, if such facilities as drainage, filling and lighting are counted in.
A bird’s eye view of Idlewild calls for superlatives in descriptive phrases. Centered in the field will be a semicircular administration building with seven loading ramps fingering out from its perimeter. The ramps themselves will be of two-story construction, and observation decks will be built on top of them. A movie theatre, two large restaurants, lounges, radio and telegraph offices, one or two branch banks, florists, haberdashers, barber shops, drug stores, coffee shops and snack bars will be afforded space in the main building.
In the center of the building will be airline ticket offices, and atop the building will be the traffic control tower
where operators direct the incoming and outgoing flow of planes throughout the day and night.
The loading fingers themselves present a nice architectural problem for the planners of Idlewild, headed by Major Elmer Haslett, Director of Airports for the City. The second floors of the fingers will be used for airline offices, air commerce handlers, city officials and the staffs of a number of other commercial aeronautical organizations. Their first floors will constitute sheltered passages for passengers enplaning and deplaning. Along these passages too — they will be huge, in keeping with everything else at Idle-wild — will run motor trucks, delivery cars, passenger automobiles, airport limousines, lift trucks and other (Continued on Page 8)