Firm Has an Offbeat, Offshore Idea for Airport in San Diego : Travel: Company floats proposal for ‘Floatport,’ a facility atop the ocean off Point Loma, as an alternative to Lindbergh. While planners see it as the wave of the future, there are doubters.

If this is Monday--or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday--there are San Diegans somewhere discussing the need, the absolute cannot-live-without-it need, to find an alternative to the city’s main airport.

Since World War II, civic boosters have been trying to find a location to replace or at least supplement Lindbergh Field, considered too cramped and limited for a city of San Diego’s stature. No less than three dozen studies have been done by various governmental agencies without much success for the last half a century.

But now there is a new idea being floated. Really floated.

Enter Floatport , a proposal for an airport atop 60 fathoms of water three miles off Point Loma.

Although clean and homey and convenient for the traveling public, Lindbergh Field has shortcomings that have formed a mantra for those engaged in public discourse over the city’s aspirations for the future.

Lindbergh is dangerously close to downtown. Lindbergh’s steep approach is a nightmare for pilots. Lindbergh’s runway is too short for the jumbo planes needed for most international flights. Lindbergh needs more cargo capacity. Lindbergh’s noise spews into nice neighborhoods and drowns out the actors at the outdoor Starlight Theatre in Balboa Park.

All of this is quite true, but it is also true that there is no NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) like the NIMBY fighting an airport plan. The list of politicians bloodied by the airport wars, including a former mayor named Pete Wilson who wanted a new airport on Otay Mesa, is a long one.

Numerous attempts at finding an outlying site for a new airport--north of San Diego, south of San Diego, in the desert east of San Diego or straddling the U.S.-Mexico border--have been beaten back by aroused homeowners. One civic power bloc, led by defrocked- mayor- turned- talk- show- firebrand Roger Hedgecock, would like the city to take over Miramar Naval Air Station but, to the bloc’s chagrin, the Pentagon shows no signs of abandoning Miramar.

The wise San Diego politician agrees that a new airport is desperately needed but leaves the NIMBY fighting to others. Just a week ago, Mayor Susan Golding, viewed by observers as one of the city’s wisest politicians, was scolded in the opinion section of the local newspaper for not risking her political capital by tackling the airport issue.

The bald truth is that, despite the editorial page and Chamber of Commerce fulminations, the move to replace Lindbergh Field is at ground zero.

“The myth of a new airport for San Diego is akin to the Loch Ness Monster,” said lawyer Michael McDade, a member of the Board of Port Commissioners, which runs Lindbergh. “Something surfaces every so often, but it turns out not to be real.”

Now, however, has come an unsolicited proposal from a physicist, an architect, an oceanographer and a computer programmer/wave energy specialist who believe they know a way to overcome the NIMBY opposition and political paralysis and give San Diego the modern airport it needs to fulfill what it sees as its economic destiny as a “world-class” city.

As envisioned by the four founders of Float Inc., the San Diego “floatport” would be like nothing the world has ever seen. Imagine an airport, a marina, a deep-water port for cruise ships, and maybe a hotel and resort, all kept afloat by a bold advance in naval engineering and all connected to land by a bridge or underwater tunnel for cars.

The Navy is so interested in what is called the pneumatic stabilized platform concept of Float Inc. that it just awarded the company a $1.5-million contract to do more work on how the concept could be used to build deep-water air bases.

Sliding the design from military to civilian use would be no problem, say the Float Inc. principals. To prove their point, they wrote an article for this month’s Marine Technology Society Journal about building a floating airport for San Diego.

“You can call us screwy visionaries, but we’re convinced that San Diego will never build another airport on land,” said the firm’s president and chief executive officer, Howard Blood, a physicist and former director of the Navy’s Naval Oceans Systems Center in San Diego. “An offshore transportation corridor is the only alternative.”

There is no shortage of doubters about an idea that would use revolutionary technology and cost in the multi-billions of dollars. “We will all be dead and in our graves before San Diego builds an airport offshore,” said political consultant John Kern.

In the 1960s, then-Mayor Frank Curran suggested using blocks of compacted trash to build an island off Coronado to serve as an airport. A rival councilman had suggested blowing the top off the mountains east of San Diego to make an “airport in the sky.”

The blue-water thinkers of Float Inc. are not discouraged by doubters and the history of failed attempts by other airport enthusiasts. Executive vice president John Nichelson, an oceanographer who spent 17 years in the military and then wrote a master’s thesis on building a floating airport for San Diego, is particularly buoyed by the challenge.

“It’s not a matter of if a floating airport is built somewhere, only when ,” Nichelson said. “It’s just that the general public doesn’t know about it yet.”

The idea of building offshore airports has tantalized engineers and airport planners for a long time and has included never-realized proposals off Huntington Beach and in the Santa Catalina Channel off the Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor.

The mammoth Bechtel Corp. of San Francisco, designer of 65 airports worldwide, did a preliminary study a decade ago for a floating airport in Japan before the Japanese decided instead to use the less cutting-edge concept of building on reclaimed bay-front land. “A floating airport is definitely do-able,” said Bechtel airport engineer Stu Hill.

The Float Inc. plan, for which it has received a patent, envisions a 3,000- to 5,000-acre platform kept above the water and stabilized by thousands of hollow concrete cylinders attached beneath. Closed at the top and open at the bottom, the cylinders--40 feet long and 20 feet in diameter--would trap air inside, like glasses turned upside down in a bathtub.

The cylinders could either be tethered to the bottom of the ocean or kept in place by forced air. Waves would lose their oomph as they wash through the huge cylinders, allowing the leeward side of the floatport to be used as a deep-water port. Turbines would turn the wave power into electricity.

Engineering possibilities aside, the idea for a floating airport is counter to the local taste in municipal edifices, which runs to the tried-and-true: boxy and cost-effective.

City Hall (1965), the downtown library (1954) and the Sports Arena (1967) were considered too small almost immediately upon completion. Grousing about their inadequacies and homeliness is a local sport.

True, the gleaming waterfront convention center that opened in 1989 has gotten rave notices for its dazzling use of concrete and glass and “flying” tents but, true to San Diego tradition, the center was considered too small even while it was under construction. City Hall and the Port Commission are now in a push-pull over who should pay for expansion.

“San Diego has been cautious to a fault,” said architecture critic Kay Kaiser, who lives in San Diego. “We’re not comfortable being pioneers with our buildings. The decision to use Teflon tents on the convention center caused a major furor and almost killed the project even though it had been done all other the world.”

San Diego is not without its claim to engineering innovation, however: The first outdoor glass elevator ever installed in an American hotel was built along the front of the downtown El Cortez Hotel in the early 1950s.

Of course, it is a far piece from a glass elevator to a floating airport, which, as Port Commissioner McDade points out, would be “the 8th, 9th or 10th wonder of the world depending on how many other wonders we have now.”

Despite all that might be going against it, Float hopes to catch a current that is strong in San Diego: respect for the military.

“San Diego knows that the military doesn’t mess around,” said Joseph Leary, the computer programmer/wave energy specialist who is Float’s senior vice president. “If the military finds this technology acceptable, it should go a long way toward making San Diego comfortable with the idea.”

Even with a stamp of approval from the Navy, it will not be easy to persuade San Diego officials to take a risk on something as new as a floating airport. Convinced that Lindbergh will be around for a long time to come, the Port Commission is renovating the terminals and adding cargo space.

And bureaucrats have already informed architect Donald Innis, Float’s board chairman, that they would want to see how well the technology worked in other projects before endorsing it for an airport.

“My response,” Innis said, “was that it’s a good thing doubts like that weren’t raised before the Golden Gate Bridge, the Eiffel Tower and the Gateway Arch of St. Louis were built.”