Today on "Impossible engineering,"
the Kansai airport,
the most ambitious land reclamation project
in modern history.
Built in the middle of Japan's Osaka bay...
...it took revolutionary engineering...
Some of the best of Japanese technology was required
to strengthen that ground below the island.
Otherwise, it would have just vanished.
...To make the impossible possible.
Captions by vitac www.Vitac.Com
captions paid for by Discovery communications
the island nation of Japan
has some of the most densely populated cities in the world.
Over 127 million people are competing for precious space.
Geography is that Japan is a very heavily populated island.
It's double the population of the u.K.
And although the island is bigger than the u.K.,
75% of it is mountainous,
and about 50% of it is at a 45-degree slope,
so you can't live on that.
So everybody's crammed into the coastal areas
and the big cities.
So when Japan announced that they would be building
their first 24-hour international airport,
it was easier said than done.
Their solution...
Create more land in the middle of Osaka bay.
They had no choice.
If you wanted the airport to be where people could get to it,
it had to be within reach of Osaka.
The logical conclusion to that was to go to the difficult place
of the Osaka bay.
Engineers would attempt to make the largest man-made island
in the world for their proposed airport.
There was risk, real risk,
in trying to build something so big
and on such an ambitious scale.
But building a massive, man-made island wasn't
the only challenge builders of the Kansai airport faced.
And earthquakes are a constant threat.
There were also unexpected obstacles
hidden beneath Osaka bay.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is the weak ground.
The ground under the sea at the site that was chosen
was so weak
that divers would sink into it if they stood on it.
Despite all this, engineers still decided to move forward
with the most ambitious land reclamation project
in modern history.
Every project is a challenge, but there is an edge to it
when you're stepping out of the known into the unknown.
It took centuries of innovation to make the bold idea
of raising an island from the sea a reality.
Creating land in open water has always been a challenge.
Prehistoric tribes in Scotland built huts in lochs,
called crannogs, to house large families.
They worked pretty well until the stilts rotted away.
In Peru, the uros people of lake titicaca
built villages on rafts of reeds
to prevent attacks by their neighbors, the incas,
but their anchoring system was unreliable.
In the pacific ocean, the rulers of the ancient saudeleur dynasty
built offshore islands to rule from,
but they took their secrets of construction to the grave.
Thankfully, a more reliable strategy for creating land
was on the horizon.
Today, the Netherlands has some of the most sophisticated water
drainage systems in the world,
but it wasn't always this way.
Over the centuries, the Netherlands
has suffered a number of catastrophic floods.
The country is constantly fighting to keep the north sea
at bay.
One third of the nation's land is below sea level,
and 65% of it is vulnerable to flooding.
By the 17th century, the growing population
was running out of dry, usable land to produce food.
The nation had a crisis on its hands.
Then, in 1609, engineer jan adriaanszoon leeghwater
came up with an ingenious solution...
...one that would change
the face of the Netherlands forever.
Water engineer nanco dolman has come to beemster polder
to see leeghwater's innovation firsthand.
The area nanco is visiting was at one time
a 27-square-mile, 10-foot-deep lake.
In the 17th century, windmills were used for water drainage,
but they had their limits.
Beemster lake was too deep for leeghwater's windmill to drain,
so he had to come up with a different solution.
Leeghwater dug a 24-mile ring canal around beemster lake.
He used the excavated soil from the canal
to create a barrier, or dyke.
Then he installed his first windmill.
It pulled water from the lake
and distributed it into his recently-dug ring canal.
What leeghwater did next was a stroke of engineering genius.
He constructed a series of windmills.
As the water level in the lake dropped,
another windmill was constructed 3 feet below it.
The dyke leeghwater constructed protected his new land
from future flooding.
It took three years
and 42 windmills to completely drain the lake,
and in 1612,
the first reclaimed piece of land in the Netherlands
was ready for cultivation.
These areas of land became known as polders.
Today, 50% of the Netherlands is made up of reclaimed land
protected by 7,500 miles of dykes and sea defenses.
But to build the largest man-made island
in the world, the designers of the Kansai airport
are going to need more than a few windmills.
The best case scenario is that all would work well
and the island would stand.
And the worst case scenario was that the whole thing
would vanish into the seabed and just keep going.
The Kansai international airport
is Japan's first 24-hour airport.
It's also located on the largest man-made island
in the world.
In the 17th century, engineers in the Netherlands
reclaimed farmland by using windmills to drain flooded land.
But Kansai's builders couldn't drain Osaka bay,
so, instead, they raised the earth above the bay.
The soft clay bottom of Osaka bay
is one of the last places on earth
you'd want to build an airport.
The clay holds water like a sponge.
If you place a heavy object on top,
the clay will compress as water is forced out,
causing the object to sink.
Some of the best of Japanese technology
was required to strengthen that ground below the island.
Otherwise, it would have just vanished.
Engineers knew that the island would sink
under the weight of their proposed airport.
The question was how much?
If they couldn't control how far the island sank,
the project would fail.
Their solution... The sand drain.
Sand drains provide water in the ground
with a shortcut to the surface.
Here's how it works.
First, engineers spread sand across the soft, clay bottom.
Then, they drive pipes into the sea floor
and fill them with sand.
They remove the pipes, leaving sand columns behind.
The idea is that the weight of the airport and island
will compress the clay.
The sand columns will help channel excess water up and out
through the sand layer.
The island will still sink,
but it will do so in a much more controlled way.
Engineers installed one million sand drains in Osaka bay.
An operation of this scale had never been attempted before.
The best case scenario is that all would work well,
and the island would stand.
And the worst case scenario
was that the whole thing would vanish into the seabed
and just keep going.
But before they could make the island,
engineers had to construct a sea wall
to protect it from the pounding waters of Osaka bay.
To keep the island from washing away,
engineers are using a decades old,
but ingenious engineering solution.
In the 1950s, engineer Pierre Danel
developed a system that would become the gold standard
in sea erosion defenses...
The tetrapod.
At Tokyo's waseda university, engineer John Batchelor
has come to see a demonstration of how tetrapods work.
Well, there will be waves at least three meters high
in a big typhoon, and they pack a lot of punch.
So it's very important
that the edge of the island is not scoured away by the waves.
This tank can simulate waves of around 10 feet,
which are a common occurrence in Osaka bay.
Two students down there are putting the model together.
They're putting pink pebbles on one side
to represent boulders,
which would be a very traditional way of protection.
And on the other side they're putting tetrapods, like this,
that link together.
It's simulating waves that are about three meters high,
which is what we'd expect from a big typhoon in the Osaka bay.
So we can see clearly from here that,
even just with one wave,
quite a few of the pink boulders have been washed,
some of them right over the island,
whereas the tetrapods have all stood firm.
And that's because the tetrapods,
even though they were lifted by the waves,
couldn't be pulled apart because of their shape.
Tetrapods also dissipate the force of the waves
because water flows around rather than against it.
Since the 1950s, Danel's tetrapods
have been protecting the world's coastlines.
And at the Kansai airport, tetrapods
were the perfect solution for the engineering team.
The airport's seawall is one of the largest examples
of tetrapod use on the planet.
The Kansai airport in Japan
is a wonder of the engineering world.
It was constructed on the largest man-made island
on the planet in the middle of Osaka bay.
Engineers placed one million sand drains
in the soft, clay seabed
to help stabilize the ground and had the daunting task
of constructing a seven-mile-long seawall.
With a 65-foot-deep,
2 1/2-by-1 1/2-mile lagoon in Osaka bay,
engineers were now ready to begin the phenomenal task
of filling it in.
They had to flatten three mountains
to generate enough fill for their new island.
Eighty ships
worked for three years ferrying dirt to the man-made lagoon.
It was enough dirt
to fill 45 football stadiums to the brim.
Once the island was ready,
engineers turned to the Kansai airport's terminal building.
The structure had to have an ultramodern look
but be able to withstand both hurricane-force winds
and earthquakes.
Architect Renzo Piano was awarded the job...
...along with his colleague, noriaki okabe.
The new island had limited space.
There was only enough room to construct one building.
It would need to fit all the functions
of a modern airport under a single roof.
So engineers turned to a trailblazing design
created almost a century ago for inspiration.
1930s Berlin was a time of huge change.
Germany had grand ambitions,
and the city was being overhauled
to create a new, modern Metropolis.
Architect Ernst Sagebiel
was commissioned to replace Berlin's old airport
with a new one that would be seen as the gateway to Europe.
What Ernst designed changed the way
airports were constructed forever.
Welcome to Tempelhof airport.
We are in the middle of Berlin right now.
Tempelhof has been described by architect Norman foster
as the mother of all airports.
At the time, this nearly 4,000-foot building
was the longest in the world.
German architect Bernard Kruz
came to study Tempelhof's historic terminal.
So this is the main departure lobby, or also arrival hold.
Imagine yourself being an air passenger at that time.
You're not used to size that big.
It was meant to impress all the passengers
that would come, from Europe, from all over the world.
For our times now, it's really not that impressive
because we know huge skyscrapers,
but this building was finished in '39.
So, at that time,
it was highest marvel of engineering in the world.
From an engineering point of view, the whole hall
is very interesting because,
for that time, it was high, advanced technology.
Sagebiel used a system of steel-reinforced,
concrete framework.
It had incredible load-bearing strength
and was covered in marble to create a vast,
monumental space.
But the Tempelhof airport wasn't all about looks.
Its layout was equally innovative.
This building was just looking way forward into the future.
This was the first airport
that was really designed like an airport
as we know it now.
All the separation that we take for granted,
that was first time done in this airport.
For the first time,
there were different areas for passenger arrivals
and departures, along with separate gates
for each flight covered by a unique, metal canopy.
This is where your plane would wait for you.
This incredible space is also an engineering masterpiece.
The canopy runs along the side of the building for 1,300 feet.
The weight of the canopy
is counterbalanced by a steel wire hidden within the building.
By using that construction,
they could achieve a very thin and light structure.
You have a huge-spanning roof
where you can actually enter with the whole plane.
So, even when it's raining or snowing or stormy,
you can enter on dry foot.
And additional, your luggage you don't have to carry yourself.
So the whole situation was just totally,
completely different from any other airport at that time.
It's hard to imagine, I'd say.
Sagebiel pushed engineering to its limits
at the Tempelhof airport.
His design would become the blueprint
of all modern airports that followed.
6,000 miles away at the Kansai airport,
engineers have taken Sagebiel's design to a whole new level.
When it opened, Kansai airport
was the longest building in the world,
just like Tempelhof.
Its main atrium is 130 feet tall and connects
to a uniquely-curved, wing-shaped departure hall
that's over a mile long.
But the greatest challenge was to design the massive terminal
building to be able to survive
the worst mother nature has to offer.
Kansai airport in Osaka bay is a modern engineering marvel
and Japan's first 24-hour airport.
When it opened, its wing-shaped terminal
was the longest building in the world.
It has 41 gates
and handles millions of passengers each year.
But Japan is in one
of the most seismically active regions in the world,
so building an airport here came with a unique set of challenges.
Engineers had to design a structure
that could withstand huge, potentially catastrophic levels
of stress.
Their solution... make sure every part of the building
can move independently.
But the greatest challenge of all was protecting
the 43,000-square-foot glass atrium.
Glass cannot dissipate energy.
It's too brittle.
So a rubber gasket was placed around each pane.
The gaskets absorb seismic energy
and allow each pane to move individually.
5,000 glass panels make up the atrium wall.
Over a period of three years,
a team of 10,000 designers, engineers, and workers
from across the globe
worked together to construct the terminal.
And not long after completion,
the building would face its first test.
In January 1995, Kobe earthquake struck the Osaka bay region,
killing more than 6,500 people
and damaging over 150,000 buildings.
But Kansai airport stood strong.
Not a single pane of glass was broken.
Since then, Kansai international has serviced
2 1/2 million flights carrying over 300 million passengers.
But a century earlier, a 24-hour stream of incoming
and outgoing flights would have been just a dream.
Civil aviation began after the first world war.
Passenger planes were converted bombers
flown by ex-military pilots.
Scientist Andrew Steele is getting a taste
of the early years when there were fewer rules
and only the brave took to the air.
That's it. All the way up.
- Oh! - All the way up.
All the way over.
Whoa, I'm going to cry.
Woo-hoo!
Before air traffic controllers,
flying was largely unregulated.
Pilots had to rely solely
on what they could see to avoid midair collisions.
Pilots relied on the most basic of navigation.
After world war I, landing strips used by fighter planes
were converted to airports.
And by the early 1920s,
croydon airport near London was the busiest in the world.
The skies quickly grew chaotic.
It was clear that an air traffic solution was needed.
Croydon airport's chief radio operator, Jimmy Jeffs,
took advantage of the plane's ability
to transmit a simple signal to invent a system that we now
recognize as the world's first air traffic control.
The system they came up with was called triangulation,
and it works like this.
Imagine there's a plane over there,
and I want to know exactly where it is.
Now, I can get that plane
to start broadcasting a radio signal.
I can then look around and find out the direction
in which that signal is strongest,
and then I know that the plane is somewhere along that line.
In order to locate exactly where it is, though,
I'm going to need to go upstairs.
The radio operators track the planes' signals from a tower.
The tower gave them a bird's-eye view of the airfield.
So this is where the radio operator would have sat,
wearing some headphones like this,
and he'd have listened out for the bearing the plane
was coming in on, the strongest direction
of that radio signal.
So if you listen carefully... There we go.
I think the bearing is about 185 degrees.
So it's time to move over to the triangulation chart.
We're here in the croydon,
and the bearing that I got was 185 degrees.
And now we know the plane is somewhere along that line,
but we don't know where.
The great innovation from here in croydon
was to realize that we could ask another radio receiving station
that also had a directional aerial,
so we might try this one in lympne.
And these guys reported a bearing of 254 degrees.
So let me just... there we go.
Line that up.
Now using these two bearings, you can see where they cross.
X marks the spot. That's where the plane is.
And if we want to be doubly sure,
we could ask a third radio receiving station.
So these guys up here in pulham,
they report a bearing of 206 degrees.
So that third bearing from pulham confirms what we thought.
The plane is definitely over Brighton.
So we can move over to the plotting chart, grab a pen,
and... here we go... Position that incoming aircraft.
And now not only do we know where that aircraft is,
but we've got the positions of all the other aircraft, too
so we can make sure they're not going to crash into each other.
Thanks to Jimmy Jeffs' innovation,
pilots now knew where they were and could find destinations,
making scheduled flights a reality.
In 1922, Jeffs was issued
with air traffic control license number one,
making him the world's first air traffic controller.
Air traffic controllers at the Kansai airport
rely on the same basic principles
Jimmy Jeffs used to keep track of planes,
but their system displays aircraft identification numbers
and keeps track of speed and altitude.
The plane's signals
are now detected by a network of satellites
called a global positioning system.
This technology allows planes to take off
and land every four minutes, 24 hours a day.
But to keep the Kansai airport up and running,
its engineering team had to tackle a problem
that they were not prepared for.
The Kansai airport in Osaka bay, Japan,
is a wonder of the engineering world.
Its mile-long terminal was built
on the world's largest man-made island
and has been specially designed to withstand earthquakes
and typhoons.
But over time, a problem began to emerge
that the team was not prepared for.
Engineers predicted that the weight of the Kansai airport
would sink the island 20 feet,
but after just three years it had already sunk over 26 feet
and was still sinking.
Parts of the island were settling at different rates,
putting uneven stress on the terminal structure.
If too much strain was placed on one section of the building,
it could collapse.
To counteract this,
engineers would need to turn to a groundbreaking innovation
from the past for the solution.
Humans have always strived to build bigger,
but to lift huge amounts of weight,
muscle power is not enough.
The ancient greeks built the first crane
using a simple pulley,
lots of power generated by just a few men,
but it was hard to control.
Leonardo Da Vinci invented the screw Jack.
It could lift weight from below,
transferring rotary motion to linear,
but this still relied on human strength.
Finally in the 19th century, a mechanic in New York
named Richard Dudgeon came up with an idea.
He boosted human power with hydraulic power.
His new jack compressed oil from a narrow cylinder
into a wider one.
The pressure in the second cylinder
was equal to the first, multiplied by its size,
therefore lifting more weight.
Engineers at the Kansai airport
are using Dudgeon's innovation in a remarkable way...
...a system that thousands of daily airport passengers
are completely unaware of.
In the basement of the terminal building,
900 fully automated hydraulic jacks have been
installed to counteract any uneven settlement.
Sensors in a control room detect when one part of the building
is out of kilter with the rest.
Each Jack is capable of lifting 300 tons
and can be activated individually.
Steel wedges are used to support the building at its new height.
Without this incredible engineering solution,
the Kansai airport's terminal building would collapse.
The Kansai airport resides on the largest man-made island
in the world.
Its mile-long terminal building is a design masterpiece.
But one system,
the stacking of the arrival floor directly above departures,
is key to the building's success.
Servicing hundreds of flights and up to 50,000 passengers
with thousands of items of luggage each day
had the potential to be a logistical nightmare.
The challenge of moving bags between floors,
through security, and delivering them to the right place
on time in a building
nearly a mile long posed quite a conundrum.
Their solution owes an enormous debt
to the innovators of the industrial revolution.
The industrial revolution was a pivotal moment in history.
It marked the transition from man power to machine power.
The steam engine provided power to machines,
but the key to driving the industrial revolution
forward was the conveyor belt.
The basic principle behind a conveyor belt
is actually very simple.
All you need is a series of rollers,
and then stretch a belt around those rollers.
By turning the roller, the material then moves.
For example, if I place an object on this end
of the conveyor belt and then provide power
to the drive pulley, using a rotational power,
like out of a steam engine, for example,
to move the object linearly along the belt.
Conveyors were traditionally flat,
made of wooden rollers and belts of cloth.
But in 1891, American industrialist Thomas Robbins
redesigned the conveyor belt
and, as a result, supercharged the industrial revolution.
Firstly, you took the flimsy material of the belt
and coated it in rubber,
which made the belt itself a lot tougher.
And secondly, you developed this three-point roller system
which curves the belt into a u shape,
which stops the rocks from falling off.
Robbins' conveyors could carry hard, heavy substances.
They transformed the coal mining industry,
which was fueling industrial manufacturing around the world.
His conveyors would eventually be adapted for use
across several industries.
Today, manufacturers use a variety
of fully-automated conveyor assembly lines
with innovative features of their own.
One of the key differences between these modern conveyor
belts and the more simple, original versions
is that these can go around corners.
And the way that works is that rather than being a belt
of material, they're actually made up of a series
of interlinked bits of metal
which allows it to articulate in different directions.
Thanks to Thomas Robbins,
conveyor belt systems are now part of our everyday life,
from manufacturing to mining and even restaurants.
At the Kansai airport, designers
have made several cutting edge modifications
to their luggage conveyor belt system.
The challenge at Kansai was to get baggage
from international check-in on the top floor of the terminal
to the aircraft 46 feet below.
The result
was the tallest spiral baggage conveyor system in the world.
It's over 2,000 feet long
and transports over 10,000 items of luggage each day.
Each bag is barcoded.
Special sensors track its progress along the conveyor.
When it reaches the correct floor, a 3D tilt tray
is activated, releasing the bag.
This system ensures that the 3 1/2 million items
that use this conveyor each year reach their correct destination.
It took 20 years
to raise an island from the depths of Osaka bay
and create a 24-hour, international airport
capable of withstanding earthquakes and typhoons.
By drawing on the innovations of the past,
adapting, improving them and making
groundbreaking innovations of their own, the engineers,
designers, and workers on the Kansai airport
overcame extraordinary obstacles
and succeeded in making the impossible... Possible.
Kansai airport island
was the biggest man-made island in the world.
Everybody, every engineer
and every people involved in this project
believes that we've achieved the impossible.