Showing posts with label Orlando airport. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orlando airport. Show all posts

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Let them eat plastic

Gopher tortoises that is.  These are foot long, nine pound grass eating turtles.  They love the long grass adjacent to the runways at Orlando FL airport.   They also love to dig burrows, long and deep ones. Although they cannot dig under the runways, they can burrow into the unpaved shoulders and overrun areas.  FAA fears that a plane skidding off the runway onto the shoulder might catch its landing gear in a turtle burrow and flip over.  Seems kinda obscure to me, but FAA has been on the airport's case to "mitigate" the turtle problem.  Making it harder, the turtles are an endangered species so the obvious measures, like picking them up and trucking them elsewhere, are illegal. 
  The airport's latest scheme.  Replace the grass along the runways with Astroturf.  $14 million worth of Astroturf.