The Starrport

 Animated demonstration at USAToday.com

For every 1 Gallon of Fuel burnned in a jet = 10,000 gallons of OXYGEN depletion oin our atmosphere. There are 40,000 gallons of fuel in one jet.

    Thousands of new airports are set to be built worldwide within the next decade. An innovative design called the StarPort  produces fuel savings of 300 million gallons a year at each airport, would require only one-third of the land as a conventional facility and yield four times the revenue.

Worldwatch Editor Ed Ayers calls the StarPort design a "breakthrough... a much more intelligent way of using Technology.

    Airports designed to handle 350 flights per day 30 years ago are now scrambling to handle 700.

    A modern airport consumes nearly 500 million gallons of fuel a year - nearly half as much fuel as burned by a large city's automobiles. But because aircraft are not required to install catalytic converters, airports are responsible for more than half of the local urban air pollution.

    The fumes from idling diesel jet engines are about 14 times more polluting than gasoline exhaust. At many airports, levels of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides are at least 10 times higher than in surrounding cities. 

    A boeing 747 jet consumes more than 500 gallons of fuel during taxiing - enough fuel to operate a car for a year. One thousand taxi-to-takeoffs consume 12 million gallons - sufficient to power 200,000 cars for a day. Only four percent of the fuel burned goes into actually moving the aircraft. The rest is thrown to the wind as exhaust and noise.

    The sprawling 52-square-mile Denver International Airport was built to handle 2,000 flights a daily - a landing or takeoff every 20 seconds. Denver International offers 100 gates and five 12,000 foot (2.3 mile long) runways. The StarPort could save $200 million in fuel costs for an airport with the air traffic of Denver International while cutting taxiing distances by 48 percent.

    Major US cities are scrambling to find airport sites that meet a simple, but impossible, description: "50 square miles of unpopulated land - close to downtown." A StarPort will be built on only 15 to 25 square miles. Instead of turning valuable open space into new mega-airports. StarPorts could be built at hundreds of smaller existing airfields that were abandoned with the move toward larger aircraft and longer runways.

    If the 2,000 new airports were StarPorts, the fuel savings would amount to two billion gallons a day - more than 1,000 times the oil the Bush administration hopes to extract from the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.