VORs are not always associated with airports. One near me is Nodine (ODI) – the VOR is in the middle of a cornfield. Sectional charts do not have the “K” (at least in the lower 48), but do seem to have the “C” for Canadian airports:
Brian
In this case, the ORD designation has nothing to do with the O’Hare name, but the fact that when build\t the airport name was Orchard Place Field.
Continuing the VOR hijack: VORs all have 3-letter identifiers. At least in most of the world’s more viationa-significant countries
Airports have 3 letter identifiers and 4-letter identifiers. Which may be similar like ORD & KORD or CYYZ & YYZ, or may be quite different EGLL & LHR.
Back in Ye Olden Dayes (1950s) VORs that were located on or near (5-10 miles) airports and were intended to facilitate instrument approaches to that airport often had the same 3-letter identifier as the airport itself.
Along about the 1970s they realized it was a mistake to have the e.g. STL VOR located 15 miles away from the STL airport in St. Louis MO. It made instructions like “proceed to STL” ambiguous once airplanes had the nav tools to go to named lat/long points, not just radio stations. This led to a big effort to rename or change the identifiers of cases with VORs that were like STL.
By the 1990s it became obvious this was mostly wasted effort as VORs were / are quickly becoming passe and most will be shut down over the next decade or so in favor of GPS-based nav.
Returning to the OP:
Explosive growth in demand, airlines willing to sell more tickets than they can actually fly on any given day, and airports & concessionaires grossly behind on ramping up staffing of truly shitty low-paid jobs. In some cases further stymied by the need for government security vetting of new employees when said government agency is also still cut back from COVID and is struggling to grow to meet the demand. And may have zero budget to do it.
Air Canada recently mass-emailed a “letter from the president” to everybody and his dog who for any reason was on any of their mailing lists (I am because I collect Air Canada air miles). The letter basically laid out some of the same reasons you did, but of course much less frankly, and with the underlying theme “not our fault!”.
This is part of what it said:
The COVID‑19 pandemic brought the world air transport system to a halt in early 2020. Now, after more than two years, global travel is resurgent, and people are returning to flying at a rate never seen in our industry.
This surge in travel has created unprecedented and unforeseen strains on all aspects of the global aviation system. Around the world, there are recurring incidents of flight delays and airport congestion, resulting from a complex array of persistent factors impacting airlines and our partners in the aviation ecosystem. Similar effects are being seen in other industries too, where companies and suppliers are struggling to restart, unclog supply chains and meet pent‑up demand.
At Air Canada, we anticipated many of these factors and began taking tangible action during the depth of the pandemic to be ready for a rapid restart. Yet, …
Ah, yes, “we did the best we could do with consummate skill, and yet …”. This was all leading up to the announcement that is summed up in just one significant sentence:
“We are now making meaningful reductions to our schedule in July and August in order to reduce passenger volumes and flows to a level we believe the air transport system can accommodate.”
IOW, “we are cancelling tons of flights to reduce passenger traffic to levels that the airlines and airport staff can accommodate”.
I was one of the people on the receiving end of that e-mail. Which I read shortly after reading an article about the problems the airlines are having. According to that article, part of the problem is that the airlines apparently thought it would take 6 or 7 years for travel to rebound to pre-pandemic levels of demand, which is just so incredibly short-sighted of them, it literally boggles my mind trying to figure out how they managed to convince themselves of that.
It was clear to me, even early in the pandemic, that the drops in demand for all sort of services - including travel - were all temporary, and that demand would rebound quite quickly once the pandemic was under control. I didn’t expect it to come back 100%, and I knew that some things might change permanently, but I also knew a large majority of people would want to “get back to normal” as quickly as possible. Hell, I was one of them - I’ve been dreaming about missed vacations literally since the first week of shutdowns, because I was right in the middle of planning a vacation that week, and saw everything getting cancelled on me.
So, yeah, “It’s not their fault”, because they were apparently not as good at predicting the future of their industry as I was.
Really… weren’t they noticing the millions of people who within a few months were already all het up about just needing to get out and away from home??
Shows how much I know about the industry’s “common wisdom” that I read that and my thought is, if you expected travel demand to not normalize until Year 6 or 7 … your damn businesses were not going to make it to see that day. If the airline/airport execs really believed that, they should have been changing jobs.
Which then makes the current situation especially daft, I mean, so over a year and a half you get not just the regular Great Resignation but on top of it your sector-specific vulnerabilities lead to a structural contraction in equipment readiness and in core and support staffing not just in the carriers but across the “ecosystem” from the concessions people to the regulators… and you supposely expected it to take 6 years to return to full normality… and then when you find there is full-level demand barely on year 3, you respond by pretending to meet that demand with full peak season schedules. Knowing you are missing the assets with which to deliver.
Yeah, the execs aren’t exactly covering themselves in glory, here.
I got that letter from Air Canada also. I wasn’t sure what to think of it.
We watched our American neighbours, flying around their country, to Thankgiving celebrations, or Christmas with faraway family, or just because Aunt Betty was having a birthday. Masks or not, vaccinations or not, Americans travelled.
Yet we were told, by Justin Trudeau, to “Go home, and stay home.” And like Canadians do when told by an authority figure, we did just that. Few travelled, and those who did were restricted by that asinine two-week hotel quarantine stay at their expense. But we were just itching to go someplace, anyplace, a vacation, a trip to visit friends, a holiday to a beach resort; we wanted to go anywhere that wasn’t the same four walls we looked at for two years. And when things opened up, we acted on two years’ worth of travel plans.
Air Canada (and Westjet and regional airlines) should have expected this. You’ve got a bunch of people who have been cooped up by their governments for two years, and suddenly, you set them free? What do you think will happen? That they’re happy in Medicine Hat, Alberta when Jamaica calls? That they’re happy in Orangeville, Ontario, when Las Vegas calls? That they’re happy in Toronto when Uncle Harry in Vancouver has passed away, and they need to get to Vancouver?
Not bloody likely. They’re going to travel, to go where they want to go, to go where they need to go.
That letter from Air Canada was incredibly short-sighted. Canadians not only want to travel, they need to travel. After being de facto prevented from doing so, Canadian airlines and airports should have expected a crush of people wanting to travel anywhere that wasn’t the same four walls they looked at for two years. Unlike our American friends.
Speaking from the inside, the American part of the industry isn’t covering itself w glory either.
Ultimately, the industry everywhere faced a near death experience. Absent trillions in subsidies to bridge the revenue drought there would not be an airline industry today. In many countries that were unwilling or unable to subsidize, that’s where they find themselves: their domestic industry and infrastructure devastated and foreign carriers hauling all their international traffic to/from their slowly recovering facilities.
Different countries subsidized a greater or lesser fraction and dictated to some degree how much size they’d pay for or equivalently, how many job losses they were content to accept. It was always unclear how long the subsidies would last. Only a fool would have assumed there’d be an un-ending stream of subsidy payments.
If vaccines hadn’t worked and we were still killing a million people a month, by now keeping a vibrant airline and tourist industry would have been triaged off governments’ lists of things to worry about as they tried to keep civilization and the bare essentials of their economy running. No food = big problem. No airlines = who cares (at that point).
No industry copes well with demand suddenly going down 90% or up 200%. Especially not one with sluggish national and local governments providing much of the daily logistic infrastructure. Who have their own revenue and hence budget crises to deal with.
Agree that the Air Canada letter was self-serving audience-deaf corporate-speak of the worst sort. But the fact they’re lying sacks of shit (US Army terminology, and darned useful even in civilian life) doesn’t alter the fact they were handed, and are still working through, a darned difficult and nearly unprecedented set of problems.
But it does alter how we think about them. Sure, it was a “darned difficult and nearly unprecedented set of problems”, but that’s part of the reason why we offered them billions in bailouts. Shutting down an airline for a few months or a year isn’t like shutting down a warehouse. We know that they need skilled workers, who take years to train. We know they need reliable workers, who can pass the security screenings. We know that, and so did they.
So what did they do with the billions in bailouts? Did they tell this group of specialized workers, “Hey, we know it’s tough, but we’re going to keep you on the books, and pay you enough of your salary that you won’t lose your house, and we’ll bring you right back in as soon as we’re allowed to fly again”?
Nope, they fired the lot of them, told them, “Good luck with that CERB business, hope the government doesn’t change their mind about that!”, and planned to not hire anyone else for 5 or 6 years because of their stupid short-sightedness.
But incompetence knows no bounds at Air Canada. I have booked (and paid for) tickets in late August. On Friday I got an announcement that the flight times had changed. Instead of leaving at 8:10 and arriving at 16:03, the flight is now scheduled to leave at 8:10 and arrive at 16:10. The email was adorned with warnings that I have to either accept the revision or make other arrangements, suggesting that they will cancel if I don’t. For a lousy 7 minutes??? So I click on the link that is supposed to allow me to confirm and it shows no change in the timetable and no way to confirm. There is also a phone number for help, but when I dial that, it never even rings and eventually just hangs up. Rinse and repeat. I have this terrible suspicion that they are going to cancel the flight and give me a credit, not a refund. Bastards!
I had that on my outbound flight last week. The only change was the terminal of my connecting flight. It’s a known Air Canada IT issue that you can safely ignore for now, but keep an eye on the flight for further changes.
For comparison to Pearson, I am currently at Frankfurt airport waiting does my flight back to Pearson. We were planning on going into the city for a few hours during our layover, but been waiting for our gate and then standing in line at the EU border for an hour we gave up and decided to just sit in the lounge. Damn that Trudeau, he’s even managed to mess up a German airport!
Your mild-mannered Prime Minister has far more extensive superpowers than one might expect. 
In an earlier era one might blame Obama. But I bet Frankfurt’s chaos today is not his fault. At least not this time.
Well, not to derail the thread, but Justin Trudeau did have to make a decision in a complex Canada-Germany-Russia-Ukraine-EU issue these past few days…
And for all you non-Canuck Dopers, it’s pronounced “why-why-zed.”
The cite for my previous comment on pronunciation: Archer: YYZ - YouTube
I fly in YYZ a lot, and it’s usually one of the better airports IMO, so it caught me off guard just how wildly bad it is right now. A couple of weeks ago, their entire entry customs system was down and they wouldn’t let us off the plane for like an hour. Then they finally let us off a plane and had us all stand in a line that snaked around the building for THREE HOURS before we finally got to customs, where they did it all by hand. I watched a worker completely lose their shit on a Chinese family that clearly did not speak English well and was trying their best to figure out what was going on because they weren’t telling us anything. It was like 9 pm by the time I got to my hotel and we landed around 2:30.
But I guess it was better than having our flights canceled outright, like some of my other friends on the same trip - Flying is somehow even more of a nightmare lately.
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Improving rapidly I see. Bravo Mr. Minister; job well done!
I’m flying out to California on Friday morning with the family. We are flying business class, have Nexus cards, and taking carry on only. We will see how things go.