Either you've missed the /s at the end or you know a lot more about some massive recent advances in tunnel drilling and construction compared to the public.
How will the royalty and their army sized entourages get to their climate meetings without airports? You can't transport multi-ton armored vehicles on sailboats.
Should and will are two different things. “You can never visit your family in your homeland again” doesn’t win votes, and is slightly less competitive than “you’ll only ever go on vacation in your local environment.”
I sort of suspect the answer here, as with all things, isn’t command but alternatives. Hydrogen and EV aircraft are nascent. Nuclear air craft exist, and can be built with modern miniature reactors that are entirely safe.
The problem is funding goes more towards killing varied brown people than improving technology.
> The problem is funding goes more towards killing varied brown people than improving technology.
The "war on terror" is mostly wound down now. But the point you're making is not correct; most advanced technology, especially aerospace, emerged from military research grants.
We have more brown people for more reasons to kill than the “war on terror”
I agree a lot of advancements came from the military but what an absurdly inefficient way to achieve that. Most of the military expenditure is on personnel and infrastructure. Military R&D is a pittance, not directly released to civil use, and inefficiently allocated. Even DOE investment is primarily towards war making and nuclear arsenal upgrade, research, and maintenance. The primary DOE fusion research is done as a slight of budget for nuclear war making rather than energy generation. The spin off tech from defense spending is a drop in the bucket of what could have been achieved had that funding been open civil research towards strategic goals like sustainable energy independence.
All this said I’ll grant that the relative global stability imposed by the US on the world has ushered in a period of discovery unrivaled by simply providing a world where global societies weren’t being repaved every 10 year, with the repaving being contained to proxy war zones. This is not without immense value - and almost certainly staved of many very bad scenarios. The trick will be maintaining that stability over the next 50 years. It’s not obvious to me we can sustain that. But what we have had was bought with that defense spending.
The winning airport design will probably be an ex-airport, returned to nature as a forest, or repurposed as a solar/wind farm.