Except that the essential description of a runway is its direction. It would be a lot more painful if you had to look up the direction of every runway.
Can't the taxiways be not straight, like have a slight zig zag to them, so that they're easily distinguishable from a runway? Not ridiculously zigzagged, but maybe 3 or 4 angles of 15 degrees along the length or something would do it.
And also so when they get cleared for “runway 15” they know which side to come on without having to consult a chart.
Also so there’s no confusion, each direction is named, so a runway that runs due North-South will be Runway 36 in the northern direction, and 18 to the south.
In practice it is rare for all but the largest airports to have more than 3 or 4 runways so it isn’t like there will be a Runway 2 and a Runway 3 at the same airport. If they need more capacity they’ll build parallel runways which will be named with a suffix, like 9L and 9R.
(Also, magnetic compasses aren’t that accurate in the first place, since there’s iron in the engines if nothing else. In theory there should be a compensation/calibration done with the results on a card, but, no guarantees that it’s done or up to date).
You want to have a consistent designation for opposite direction runways. (9R is always the same piece of pavement as 27L)
Doing that for 4 would need one direction to be A B C D and the other to be B C D E (which is workable, but doesn't seem particularly more elegant than just using left, right, and center [and in fact is worse in some ways, since from one direction, B is the left-most and from the other, it's A])
Runway numeric designators are the compass heading of the runway, divided by 10.
So, Runway 27 would be a runway oriented at 270 degrees. The other end of that runway would be runway 9 (It's 180 degrees the opposite direction, 18 lower).
Therefore, a runway 60 would indicate 600 degrees, on a 360 degree arc ... :)
Wouldn't this whole problem disappear if runways were designed differently, at the minimum one exclusive for landing and one for takeoff with no chance for planes landing and planes taking off to meet, like 2 parallel hockey sticks.
Both runways would be painted and lit up completely differently with large lettering explicitly saying take off and landing.
Perhaps this is a dumb question but is there any reason why the taxiway doesn't have HUGE red Xs going down it and the runway with HUGE green arrow going down? Sorta like what they do on bridges where the lanes can shift to allow more cares to travel in one direction but more obvious? They could even angle them so the planes on the ground see them differently or not at all.
Runways are aligned with the prevailing winds in the area, such that aircraft can land along either direction depending on the wind. The uphill/downhill slope thing would require twice as many runways per airport lest pilots be stuck trying to take off uphill into the wind.
My favourite one shows the orientations of all airport runways [1]. Since they runways align with prevailing wind directions, it's effectively a map of the winds.
One other thing not covered, on any airport chart, the exact alignment of the runway will be noted, usually down a tenth of degree.
So the numbering is a useful backup and discriminator, but the charts have much more detail, and modern navigational and instrument systems on runways obviate much of this for most flights anyways.
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