"Chicago-Funded Report Favors City's Plan for O'Hare Airport"

Friday, September 12, 2003

Chicago-Funded Report Favors City's Plan for O'Hare Airport
The Chicago (IL) Tribune


Chicago officials told the Federal Aviation Administration Thursday that a
new city-funded study shows the air controllers' proposal to realign the
southern runway in the O'Hare expansion project would be more expensive and
produce more flight delays than the original plan.

O'Hare's air-traffic controllers union, which had sought changes in the
runway layout to reduce the number of potentially dangerous runway crossings
by aircraft, said the city is putting financial concerns ahead of safety.

The results of the city's runway simulation testing, requested by the FAA,
greatly increase the likelihood that the six parallel east-west runways
proposed by the Daley administration more two years ago will advance unless
the FAA finds a fatal flaw.

The concept favored by the controllers would require relocation of cargo
facilities, increasing the cost of the city's $6.6 billion O'Hare expansion
by $394 million, according to a city consultant.

The FAA also asked the city to study a third option, building a parallel
runway as in the city plan and the controllers' diagonal runway. This option
would result in nine runways instead of eight and would require moving more
cargo buildings and the airport post office, costing $579 million more than
the city plan, the consultant said.

The FAA began to review the report Thursday and will look at the methods
used in the flight simulations before deciding whether the conclusions in
the report are valid, FAA spokesman Tony Molinaro said. He said the agency
would conduct its own simulations as part of a comprehensive environmental
impact statement on the O'Hare expansion plan.

As part of refining its proposal, Chicago aviation officials made changes to
four taxiways to address FAA concerns that the city overstated the airport's
capacity to handle takeoffs and landings during bad weather. The FAA sent
the plan back to O'Hare officials in August after determining 176 planes an
hour could take off and land to the east during poor visibility, not 242
planes an hour as the city projected.

Taxiway modifications now submitted for FAA review increase the number of
planes to 230 an hour during peak periods, according to the simulations done
by the city's airport contractor, Ricondo & Associates Inc.

Rosemarie Andolino, O'Hare expansion project manager, said the city's runway
concept "performs better [than the alternatives studied], requires the same
amount of land [currently outside O'Hare's boundaries] and is cheaper."

City officials acknowledged the total number of flights accommodated at the
airport would be similar under all the plans. But the study found delays
would be limited under the city's plan to about 11 minutes per flight versus
about 14 minutes per flight in the controllers' plan and 13 minutes in the
third option, based on daily traffic of 3,864 takeoffs and landings. O'Hare
now handles about 2,700 flights a day.

In the alternative embraced by some FAA officials, controllers proposed
repositioning the proposed southern runway on a northwest-to-southeast
diagonal to eliminate hundreds of runway crossings each day, balance the
number of runways used for arrivals and departures to smooth flow and
minimize flight delays.

"The city's runway plan creates 485 more runway crossings on the south side
of the airport and 1,000 total runway crossings airportwide" each day, said
Craig Burzych, president at O'Hare of the National Air Traffic Controllers
Association. "They are not concerned with safety. They are looking at
dollars."

Reducing runway incursions is the top priority for commercial aviation set
by the National Transportation Safety Board because of the danger of
aircraft collisions at busy airports like O'Hare.

Andolino disputed the controllers' claim that the city's plan would
jeopardize safety. The Ricondo study projected 629 planes a day taxiing from
taxiway to runway under the city's plan. The report showed 327 taxiing under
the controller's plan.

But Andolino pointed to successful safety records at airports in Dallas and
Atlanta with parallel runways requiring planes to taxi across active runways
more than 1,000 times a day.

FAA records show that two incidents in which two planes were on the same
runway occurred this year at Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport.

"We do 1,800 runway crossings a day. That means I have 1,800 chances to hit
you," said Mark Mulder, a veteran controller at Dallas who urged O'Hare
officials to grasp the opportunity created in the airfield reconfiguration
to devise the safest plan possible.

"One of the neat things about O'Hare is that you don't currently have many
runway crossings," Mulder said. "Everybody knows they are dangerous. Why go
with a plan that introduces risk, especially in Chicago where you get so
much snow and intense fog?"

Controllers also questioned results from the simulation at O'Hare showing
the city's plan would accommodate roughly the same number of flights each
hour as the alternative plan that requires fewer runway crossings.

They said the pattern that has evolved at Dallas and Atlanta's Hartsfield
International Airport requires controllers to stop planes from departing
about every five minutes in order to allow planes that have landed to taxi
across the runways to the terminals.


 Do you have an opinion about this story?
Share it with other readers in our CAA Discussion Forums

http://www.californiaaviation.org/dc/dcboard.php

*****************************************