haha I'm going on a treasure hunt for the Jewel Box tomorrow!!
Now slightly off topic, I just had a browse through your flicker photostream and can I just say WOW, you've got brilliant planetary captures and compositions, so many hours of work it's just great. A couple of standouts and they are Saturn in daylight (sooo cool) and the ISS and shuttles. Great work
You may be on to something!
The airport of course, was named after Charles Kingsford Smith who made the first trans-pacific flight in an aircraft named Southern Cross.
Also, the airport lies at the end of Southern Cross Drive.
A few too many coincidences?
This got me curious so I started looking for information, but nothing I could find except here in this Wikki article.
No mention of the connection- from what this article says, perhaps a co-incidence? Because it says that they ended up having to extend a couple of runways much later when it was built.
I don't know anything about this stuff, so I watch here with interest what you guys come up with.
By the 1960s the need for a new international terminal had become apparent, and work commenced in late 1966. The new terminal was officially opened on 3 May 1970, by Queen Elizabeth II. The first Boeing 747 "Jumbo Jet" to serve the airport, Pan American'sClipper Flying Cloud (N734PA), arrived on 4 October 1970. In the 1970s the north-south runway was expanded to become one of the longest runways in the southern hemisphere. The international terminal was expanded in 1992 and has undergone several refurbishments since then.
The limitations of having only two runways that crossed each other had become apparent and various governments grappled with Sydney's airport capacity for decades. Eventually, the controversial decision to build a third runway was made. The third runway was built parallel to the existing runway 16/34, entirely on reclaimed land from Botany Bay. A proposed new airport on the outskirts of Sydney was shelved in 2004, before being reexamined in 2009-2012 showing that Kingsford Smith airport will not be able to cope by 2030
The 'long' runway at Sydney was part paid for by NASA so that the Space Shuttle could use it in an emergency. I believe it is the only runway in the southern hemisphere that is able to handle a 'runaway' shuttle.
Pure coincidence. The runways at Sydney are aligned purely for the most prevalent winds, and no other "conspiracy"
Pretty sure Darwin could handle a Shuttle too. You could land a 747 SIDEWAYS almost at Darwin it is so darned wide! Well, it was built for B-52 staging etc Plus, it is one of the few Aussie runways long enough for the now defunct Concorde (and was used for such).
Happy to stand corrected, but I think airports like to have crossing runways(where possible) to suit wind direction.
LewisM and/or Peter Ward might be able to shed some light?
Simon, yes, they have cross runways to cater for usually atypical conditions. Usually shorter runways, as they are more oriented for GA aircraft that do not generally have as high x-wind limitations or autoland
So, the LONG runways are typical 80% of the time wind oriented, and the other 20% for the other. My figures are guesses only I am no statistician.
Sydney Runways and the Southern Cross
