I’ve been following the news today and it sounds like Chicago O’Hare was essentially shut down due to the snow storm. But in one newscast they said that they were plowing the runways and that a few planes were both taking off and landing.
So how exactly does that work? Who decides which flights are allowed to takeoff and which ones are allowed to land? Do international flights get priority?
Any flight already in the air having any sort of emergency has priority over everybody else. So part of the reason they needed to try to keep at least runway open is in case an en route airplane was having an emergency.
This would include flights that were diverting from their intended destination due to extreme weather. Those flights might be either domestic or international in origin.
Other priorities would be something like a medical flight, or one full of emergency responders.
Unless the airport is officially closed it’s the pilot that has the final say in take offs, a pilot can always refuse to go (though there may be consequences if an employer is unhappy with that decision). ATC may put flights with less priority behind those with more, and if conditions abruptly worsen they may just stop giving take off clearances.
For landings procedures shouldn’t be too different than normal, other than reduced capacity. A pilot declaring an emergency, however, gets priority as noted. A “ground stop” may be called which means commercial/scheduled flights aren’t issued clearances to take off for an airport in severe conditions, but that doesn’t prevent the occasional airplane showing up and asking for a landing.
I"ll let the big iron guys elaborate on that rather simplified answer.
I heard on WGN radio earlier today that one of the flights was a charter for either the Bulls or the Blackhawks I can’t remember which now.
Given that the commercial airlines pretty much canceled the bulk of their flights even with reduced capacity getting a few charters in and out shouldn’t have been a problem.
A flight forced to land because of some security issue (drunk passenger getting 'way out of control) or medical situation (pregnant woman going into labor) aboard would also get a priority landing, wouldn’t it?
Has it ever happened that a pilot declared an emergency for bogus reasons just to get on the ground faster, or was thought to have overreacted to a minor crisis, and was disciplined or fired for it?
Yes.
That would qualify as either an in-flight emergency, or a serious situation that could easily escalate to an emergency. In the unlikely event of multiple emergencies over an airport those guys would be behind the dead engines/flaming airplane situations but ahead of normal, uneventful flights.
Yes.
Any time you declare an emergency you can be called up to explain your actions, and for some there are mandatory post-emergency inspections required. Deliberate false claims of emergencies are subject to penalties.
Overreacting to something? First time the pilot almost certainly get the benefit of the doubt. If it becomes a pattern, not so much.
In some instances, what appears to be an emergency might not be. For example a malfunctioning fuel gauge might indicate that the airplane is about to run out of fuel, which would trigger an emergency, but in reality that’s not the case. That’s not a real emergency, but based on the information available to the pilot there’s no way to know that, so there would be no penalty. Likewise, an indication of fire aboard an airliner due to faulty sensors would not incur a penalty.
Really, they’d rather have more false alarms due to pilots being cautious than tragedies because a pilot was hesitant to declare an emergency. It’s more of a problem that pilots don’t declare an emergency when they should than the other way around, though both do happen.
(The above is based on information I received at FAA safety seminars)
Very interesting, and sensible - thanks!