Posted on 01/06/2011 8:52:44 AM PST by TaraP
The airport has closed its primary runway until Jan. 13 to repaint the numeric designators at each end and change taxiway signage to account for the shift in location of the Earth's magnetic north pole.
The closure of the west parallel runway will result in more activity on the east parallel runway and more noise for residential areas of South Tampa.
The busiest runway will be re-designated 19R/1L on aviation charts. It's been 18R/36L, indicating its alignment along the 180-degree approach from the north and the 360-degree approach from the south.
Later this month, the airport's east parallel runway and the seldom used east-west runway will be closed to change signage to their new designations.
The Federal Aviation Administration required the runway designation change to account for what a National Geographic News report described as a gradual shift of the Earth's magnetic pole at nearly 40 miles a year toward Russia because of magnetic changes in the core of the planet.
I guess that means I can forget the old saying I used when learning to fly back in the 50’s, “East is least and West is best”? And “True virgins make dull company.”
Ah, the good ol’ days!!
Who is going to move the North Star?
You’re welcome
I thought RGO was closed about ten years ago, except as a museum. The RGO was incorporated into the NPL (British National Physics Laboratory) and moved physically out of Greenwich and then abolished. What site are you referring to as the the RGO site? BTW, the Nautical Almanac had been a joint venture of the USNO and the RGO for about a century and then the RGO dropped out and Her Majesty’s Printing Office doesn’t even publish it anymore. Shame.
Maybe it’s so the pilots have one less thing to correct for.
Once you get in northern Canada they do designate the runways using true north rather than magnetic north.
Perhaps the north pole prefers the manly Vladimir Putin to the metrosexual 0bama and it's running away.
Isn’t it really a digital readout, and not an actual compass?
Obama will claim credit for the 10 jobs this creates..
Tampa Bay team renamed Beaconaires
The FAA
Actually, it does make some sense if you understand that many people who live in Warsaw and Krakow don't have cars with automatic transmission.
;-)
Seems to me it would make more sense to orient runways based on the prevailing winds
http://www.evolutionaryleaps.com/Bookviews_Top_of_the_list.htm
Alexander Fefelov, a senior spokesman for the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, said that planet Earth would have its magnetic and geographic poles relocated during the upcoming years. Planet Earth on the orbit is a round object in weightlessness. The planet may suddenly change its axial inclination from time to time. It happens once in 23,000 years. The pole displacement angle may reach 30 degrees. The South Pole used to be located in the area of Easter Island before the latest displacement, whereas the North Pole was located in the Himalayas. That is why mammoths, rhinoceroses and saber-toothed tigers used to inhabit Arctic latitudes. It was a very sudden displacement of poles. Archeologists still uncover animals with indigested herbal food in their stomachs, which means that the animals died as a result of fast freezing, so to speak, the scientist said.
Once in 23kyrs...odd that many believe this event will occur around Dec 2012.
Sounds like discrimination to me.
very funnski
Given 40 miles per year and Earth's cicumference of 24,901 miles, it will take 622.525 years to get back to where it is now; but that contradicts scientific findings.
Darwinists tell us that ... "Every few hundred thousand years, what was the North Pole becomes the South Pole ..." based on "... Great strips of magnetic reversal across the bottom of the ocean mark thier movements." (From "Darwin's Ghost," page 252)
Looks to me like we have a wobbling Earth subject to occasional catastrophic happenings.
We have those placemats, too, in our house in Maine.
Perfect for navigation.
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