Today’s Review-Journal has an article on an FAA proposal to divert flights departing McCarran airport to fly over different parts of the city. The purpose of the plan is to increase the efficiency of departures out of the Las Vegas airport, which is the sixth-busiest passenger airport in the nation.

In the proposal, upscale neighborhoods such as parts of Summerlin and North Las Vegas would be under the new flight path, and so these communities are obviously unhappy about the plans. Of course, the parts of Vegas that unfairly share the brunt of air traffic (the east for arrivals, the southwest for departures) don’t have the wealth nor representation of areas such as Summerlin. I see the plan as a necessary step for a city that desires to have such an important airport smack in the middle of their city.

And I mean right in the middle. As you can see in the Google Maps snapshot above, the airport is immediately adjacent to the Las Vegas Strip, and is surrounded by UNLV and residential/commercial areas on the other sides (not pictured). This may have made sense decades ago when the center of Las Vegas was many miles north, but since then the casinos and hotels have developed south towards the airport (to avoid city taxes – most of the Strip is in unicorporated Clark County, not the city of Las Vegas). I can literally see the airport from where I live if I walk on my street, but since I’m out of the flight path I almost hear no noise, just the occassional engine rearing up.

Las Vegas is growing, and the airport is only getting bigger, so I wonder why there isn’t a movement to build a new airport outside of the valley where there’s nothing but desert. Even from out there, one could get to the Strip within 20 minutes, which is better than average for airports in large cities. Certainly this would cost a nontrivial amount, but I imagine that the removal of McCarran airport could do wonders for urban planning in this city (if there is any).