​Demolish every so-called airport to make room for building actual airports, ie. terminals and runways that sit thousands of feet up in the air.

The real fuel economy method lies not in building airstrips at an incline (although that can’t hurt either) but in removing the need for aircrafts to climb upwards so much in the first place, only for them to then waste so much of their acquired kinetic energy by reducing altitude then braking heavily. Planes could just fly at a fixed altitude if we simply demolished every airport in order to rebuild them all at a more flight-appropriate height, something like 5,000 feet.

The slight issue of how to transport people and luggage to a piece of infrastructure that sits at such a heightened elevation has many attractive, feasible solutions. Helicopters are an obvious one. Parachutes on the way down. Catapults. Elevators for a more classic feel. Escalators, perhaps designed so as to form an ascending spiral. Cargo baskets, just like the ones we already deploy to load the food trays onboard, only engineered with a higher clearance. Rail is always nice too, at a 5% grade or so and coming straight from nearby urban centers a few miles away. And of course, stairways for fire code compliance and reducing our individual environmental footprint. The time has come to rethink urban planning as it pertains to air travel, this time under the banner of progress and rationality.

(Edit: grammar)