The $100,000 Placemat

In the 1980s, I was tasked with the preliminary site plan for a Coast Guard Air Search and Rescue facility at Cold Bay, Alaska—home to caribou, bears, and a vital 10,000-foot runway.

Despite the six-figure budget, the core of the project was solved in a single evening. Over dinner in the mess hall, we sketched the runway layout on the back of a placemat. By applying basic logic—eliminating quadrants that required runway crossings and calculating setbacks for the tail height of a C-130 Hercules—we delivered 95% of the project’s value using only 5% of the budget.