JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1102

The presumption of this Illustrated London News article (“On the Impulse to Fly Commercially”, 18 October 1919) on the growing popularity of commercial flying for business and pleasure was correct, but the placement of the airports to service the growing community of flyers was, well, not.  

This is a prototype, of sorts, for many dozens of proposals that would appear in magazines like  Science and Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and so on, suggesting inner-city airports that could be easily accommodated by the city bustle by placing the airport on top of buildings (as above), and these other closely-related ideas (below):

[Picture source: Paleofuture.com]

and this:

[Picture source, again, from Paleofutue.com]

These terrible ideas were also seen in building enormous platforms over entire sections of the city (like Zecendorf’s massively bad 1946 idea)

or massive flyovers on rivers (which I also wrote about here),

or enormous floating airport islands (like that proposed by Norman Bel Geddes at the tip of Manhattan,  

and of course a series of airports that stretched across the Atlantic.

But they all had to start somewhere, and perhaps this Illustrated London News entry for 1919 was among the first wave of these proposals.