Aerospace Engineers Propose Building Circular Runways

For a minute there I thought this was one of Miss C's AI generated 2020 headlines.

Whoever the engineers are, they don't understand aerodynamics very well. Airplanes take off and land into the wind. This lets them borrow airspeed from the local wind conditions. This means that runways are aligned with the dominant wind vectors at the airport. If you make the runways circular you can still only takeoff and land at two places on the circle set by wind conditions.
The only time this would be advantageous is if you build the airport on a site where the wind is highly variable. Even then, the air traffic control would be crazy.

Even with straight runways planes skid off. Can you imagine trying land a fully loaded 787 in a storm with wind sheer and thermals?

Early airports have been build as disc shaped landing areas, and they have evolved to the strip design, i really assume that there is no way back. A very good example of designers having no clue of the subject matter they design and the fact that the road to hell is plastered with good intentions. Usually the landing gear of a plane is not well designed to make high speed turns. Additionally landing in a curve would also increase the landing speed, which is not desirable, and bringing a plane into the air seems also much more complicated. Air traffic patterns for this "merry fly round" seem to be just horrible. Ok fine, where do you put those usual markers for "blast pad", "threschold", and the markings indicating the distance to the end of the runway. Also is it clockwise or counterclockwise landing ring, or will it vary depending on righthand or lefthand traffic used in the streets of the respective country. Any pilot of a conventional taildragger landing gear airplane surely will experience new level of cursing when using this landing strip. Putting an aricraft damageless onto the grround requires a nubmer of decisions, it is already difficult enough to make all these decisions if you have clear limits and markings in case of smooth transitions as in case of a circular runway, this just sucks. I imagine the ILS design for instrument landing and the approach lighting system not to talk of VASI, PAPI or OLS on this monstrosity. The fact that even the research has been funded by the European Commission, indicates that the european commission should be given less money. And due to the fact that usually there is always a predominant direction of wind, it would be a waste of ressources to also provide possibilities to land in directions usually not requried. And finally the pilots and traffick controlles and the navigation map painters will immediately notice that the design is missing the gibbets for honouring the designers.They also designed an aircraft that would be optimised for use of the Endless Runway" should be the killer argument against this design.