Fixed-Wing Runway Design

CGP Grey has tackled this in his usual brilliant rabbit hole fashion: https://youtu.be/HSRmfNDk87s

there are various earlier, and perhaps current designs for grass strips, where differnt species mixes, and work are prescribed for different zones, as the ends of the runnways where landings occur can be reenforced, but taxi and take off runns can be less heavy duty. agricultural colleges were(are?) tasked with this sort of thing. we have a very large formerly paved airport localy, that has gone back to grass all by itself, and is now mowed, but it generaly only sees light planes, but the underlying gravel bed and drainage systems are still intact, and so could be used for landing a heavy jet in an emergency, but with a number of 9000' paved runways quite close, that has not happened yet. in any case,the load bearing capacity of different soils and terains is quite well understood, and heavy jets have emergency landed in crop fields unharmed, and then been flown out after some modest preperations

Reading about how other industries have created tight controls, standardization, good documentation is always of some interest.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

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I will take this any day over the SAAS/VC/AI stuff.

This is very interesting - engineering is tackling problems others have had to tackle before. With anything from drone economy to personal aircraft coming to life in the near future, to new gear being designed, somebody on HN is working on it.