By the time the trees reach the maturity pictured, our civilization will be ruined by its own profligacy. The irony is bittersweet.

I hope the designers made sure that they have room for several more runways to be built alongside the first 6.

This is a fantastic idea. Would be better if access could be made via train from the North end though. Keeping it well out of the way ensures a lot of homes and businesses will not be affected by building work, noise etc.

Expensive....but hey...China did it sort of with their new airport, the island concept, not the same as this, but they created an artificial island for their new airport.

Cool design. I'm assuming that the wind never blows hard from the north or south? Or does the island weathervane? Now that would be really cool! And only an extra $200B! Heathrow is a nightmare, and is only going to get worse. Unless someone can find a better solution, this may be the best one. whatever the budget and timeline is, plan on double.........

Sure hope they make those polders high enough, so when the ice caps melt it is not underwater.

Always thought it ridiculous for airliners to haul tons of landing gear with associated mechanisms to 30.000' where they are of no use whatsoever.Why not bring back the concept of landing on water instead?
Build an air harbor instead with modern floating airliners. Imagine the reduced construction costs for air harbors and planes. The airlines would love the freed up tonnage where they could cram in even more passengers. Could work even at land locked locations with 3-4 feet deep channels instead of expensive concrete runways.

The concept and placement is good but I have a couple of comments. a) The runways look very short! b) The polders don't look very high. This airport will need to be able to cope with some very big storms.
Anyway, it'll be interesting if this comes to fruition.

@ stan lind The reinforced bottom of a flying boat probably weighs as much as the landing gear, and the fuel cost of pushing through the water to take off burns more fuel that carrying the landing gear around.
@ mooseman
The runways look to be about 2 miles long. for a cool near sea level airport those are long runways.

The idea seems good. Though this give many job opportunities and the infrastructural and economical development to the East of London. What about the wind speeds ,the climate, any tidal waves and will there be a effect because of the increase of water level in the oceans due to increasing global warming.