1 ICAO and FAA assign elevated hazard to runway incursions without any regard to the circumstances. I once met a guy who said that he avoids flying into Albuquerque Sunport because... wait for it... "airport diagram has many hot spots (FAA designated areas of elevated risk of incursions)". I swear I facepalmed, because duuuuuude you're going to exit 3000 ft before the first of the hotspots... It's just mindless machine grinding its gears.

2 Ah, this reminded me of the Slideshow from Popular Mechanics.  Obviously, when Gibraltar made the airport, they didn't have the new building techniques, so they couldn't pull off what they did in Hong Kong, Macau & Osaka.  Which is build an Island for your airport. 

But, considering the amazing lack of accidents, there's really not much reason to invest the tens of millions of dollars to extend the runway out into the eastern oceanside. 

3 There is (or at least there was when I was there) a similar airport in Panama.  The runway runs right across the Intercontinental Highway.  For extra comfort, this is just a little cropduster airport, so there is no tower, no lights, just a simple wooden barrier that someone has to walk out and lower before the plane goes across.  I remember one time driving back home around 2am, and I saw the lights of a plane coming, without the barrier being down.  Obviously that wasn't a crop-dusting flight...

4 I'm a bit surprised they didn't include Schiphol in that list. It's a perfectly ordinary airport, except that it's below sea level. The name means "ship's grave" because before the dikes were built and the land drained, it was very treacherous sailing and a lot of ships were lost in that area.

5 Some small airfields in the smaller parts of the USA are pretty funny.  I've been at a stop sign with a "Plane Landing" sign before.  (Airfield starts right where you stop.)  And I caught a story one time about a chunk of Montana where the road so the local dinner is also a functional airstrip.  So you get cars parked next to small aircraft.

Though it's a great reminder that the single most dangerous part of flight is the take off and landing. 

6 Nah, the tunnel would be below the water table, clearly what they need is an overpass.

7 I live in Dallas.  There's a couple of small, private airfields that run close and perpendicular to the road.  (One of them is probably just a paved spot on some guy's farmland.)  I've had little plans come zooming by as I was passing--the one I called out, I had to brake once, because it felt like we might collide as he went by!  (Probably wouldn't have happened, but it's freaky.)  Those are both up in the McKinney area.  There's a GA airport near where I live (Addison Airport) that has a tunnel under the runway.
Finally, when I lived in New England, I remember that Pease AFB (which closed by BRAC, and made into a GA airport called Pease International Tradeport) had an overpass over I-95 that was perpendicular to the runway and *very* close to it.  Being elevated, it was a regular occurrence to drive along and have a decent-sized plane zoom right overhead, at what felt like maybe 50-100 feet up.
Given the layout of Gibralter, I wonder how much effort it would take to build a tunnel and keep it dry.  It's not as if we don't know how to build underwater tunnels and keep them dry; the question, I guess, is whether it's cost-effective.

8 I have a "Cubdriver Alaska" DVD where Loni goes into town to buy supplies and lands on the street and taxies up to a supermarket. Apparently it's a daily occurence in parts of Alaska (obviously not in Anchorage).

9

I think the problem is that if they wanted to put in a tunnel, the air strip would have to be shut down for about a month.

The existing system seems to work, and losing all air traffic for a month would be a huge problem, so there's little incentive to make the change.

If a jet hits a car, and 300 people are killed, then maybe they'd start thinking about it.

10 I don't think you can kill 300 people by hitting a car with an airliner of that kind that flies into Gibraltar. Maybe 120 at best.

11 Small world, RickC.  I live in Carrollton, TX.