" One of the main issues was that a height of 1828 feet would have been directly in line of McCarran airport's alternate flight plan, so the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as the city council, forced the designers to make the tower shorter. .
This proved interesting to me as a designer in the making; when designing a skyscraper, or in this case a tower, the local airport flight plans should always be taken into consideration. The Stratosphere Tower is located on the Las Vegas strip, only a few miles from McCarran Airport. It is surprising that none of the engineers or designers thought to take the flight plans into consideration during all of the preliminary testing. The engineers even went as far as writing a computer program in order to analyze the dynamic response to wind and vibration the additional "spine" portion of the tower would have. As a designer of the tallest free stand structure in the world that is going to be located five miles from an international airport, I would certainly deem it important to check FAA regulations before spending a significant amount of money on additional testing, engineering, and computer software. .
It is never a bad idea as an engineer or designer to double up on the code requirements. In the case of the Space Needle, the engineers doubled whatever the code requirements were back in 1961, and even today the structure is still up to code unlike a lot of structures built during that time. Another driving force in the design/construction of such a tall project is wind engineering. Halfway through the construction of the project, it was decided to add some extra amusement rides to the top of the tower. With the help of additional structural design concepts as well as wind engineering, structural integrity was not compromised. The engineers used the high-frequency base balance, or HFBB, to find structural accelerations and frame loans on the observation deck.