>Catapults accelerate aircraft to the point of generating enough lift for powered flight. Yes, but the reason they're used is because it's infeasible or too ex

>Catapults accelerate aircraft to the point of generating enough lift for powered flight. Yes, but the reason they're used is because it's infeasible or too expensive to build an aircraft carrier long enough to have jets reliably take off from them without this extra boost. Even so, those catapults are fairly short: notice they're only a fraction of the length of the carrier. They're not used in regular airports because they're not absolutely necessary, the way they are on aircraft carriers. It's more expense, and planes can do without them. However, there's a cost to this: the planes need bigger engines and more fuel to take off reliably. And bigger engines are less efficient overall (as in cruising). So there would be a significant fuel savings if you could count on having catapults on the ground to help get the plane to takeoff speed: you could downsize the engines, and carry less fuel, saving a lot of money overall per flight (not to mention all the carbon pollution). Finally, the extra g-forces shouldn't be a big deal. There's high g-forces in a carrier launch because the catapults are very short. And until recently, they were steam powered. This needn't be the case with commercial aviation: they can use modern electromagnetic launchers, and they can make the catapults very long (as long as much of the runway), to have lower peak acceleration. Basically, the planes and passengers would not need to experience higher g-forces than they already do; they'd just be getting them from the catapult instead of solely from the engines.