I believe he teaches the technique on runways which tend to be straight. But it can be used to land in the circular irrigation pivots.
Difficulty level increased by 500%, accident/incident rate increased by – who knows how much. Imagine LVO to that!
Circular runways will not happen during our lifetime.
I especially like that Peter’s curving runway also has a steep gradient and nearby hills to complicate the approach and keep winds unpredictable!!!!
Pirho wrote:
I know one of the pluses of the circular runway was being able to take off and land into wind every time – but how does this work in practice?
Landing into the wind on a circular runway is quite simple from a flying POV. Challenge is to have an instrument approach procedure to every point of the runway (with the required free areas, etc.) – obviously including missed approach procedure spaces in every direction.
Taking off is much more tricky: The advantage of always taking off into the wind can only be leveraged if the take off point is exactly where the runway is perpendicular to the wind direction. So the biggest change from a straight to a circular runway is that one shifts from defining the starting point of the ground roll, one defines the liftoff point. In order to do that, one needs to calculate the ground roll very carefully – considering that the relative wind direction is constantly changing throughout the ground roll.
For CAT operations I’d assume it is not even a huge change – for private GA, however, that is obviously quite a difference from today’s “I’m not over MTOW and there is not tailwind so everything longer than xxx does the trick”. But perhaps it would even be a safety feature that finally one would need an individual ground roll calculation for every GA takeoff ;-)
Malibuflyer wrote:
For CAT operations I’d assume it is not even a huge change
It would be.
A complete revolution. Mission impossible. 
Malibuflyer wrote:
“I’m not over MTOW and there is not tailwind so everything longer than xxx does the trick”.
GA pilots would probably stop doing any ground roll calculation and instead try to get into the air within one revolution. If that fails leave some luggage behind and try again.
I have only just realised that a circular runway would be of an infinite length…
Good business for tyre companies.
Clipperstorch wrote:
GA pilots would probably stop doing any ground roll calculation and instead try to get into the air within one revolution. If that fails leave some luggage behind and try again.
Given that they consider 3km diameter runways (so >6km length) at the average ground roll speed of some small GA planes that revolution might take longer than the average monthly flight time of a GA pilot ;-) Buying a Porsche might be a better option for that…
More seriously: That is actually one of the core dangers of such circular runway ideas with low power planes – if you miss the optimal takeoff point, the headwind component get’s smaller when you go on so that the takeoff even gets harder.
If the curvature was designed for a 747, then in a light GA plane the curvature would be irrelevant. Just take off and land “diagonal”. Here at ENVA even 737s do that, sort of (except Wiz Air of course 
) The runway is 27/09, and when the wind is from SE it can be severely turbulent. They come in on visual, make the final flying SE, then rotate E at touch down.
But, straight lines doesn’t take much space, curved runways, circles, would take an awful lot of space IMO.
We are al sort of negative! Let’s pull that into a positive spirit!
I’d fully support that all airports are rapidly switched to circular runways! Let’s do a global internet campaign on that!
Why? It would finally bring back to life one of my most favorite airplanes, the Bae-146 “Jumbolino”! As it is obvious that 2 engine jets would be a very bad idea on circular runways (as they would need hangar-gate size stabilizers to compensate loss of outbound engine at V1), we will se many cool new designs of 4 engine small jets ;-)
