And those two stats illustrate the alpha & omega of airport traffic measures. Both do not take into account the size of the planes or the passenger volume, which is quite different.
In the chart linked to earlier, little Van Nuys airport in Los Angeles (VNY) is shown as having more activity than Mexico City or Boston, and not far behind some New York airports. But I doubt if a 747 could land in Van Nuys, which is strictly for small and private planes.
VNY is one of the most-developed and busiest general aviation fields in the world, hardly “little”. Its *single *main runway is 8000 feet long, while a 747 requires about 10,000.
Cincinnati, Ohio’s airport is actually in northern Kentucky, about 20-30 minutes from the city, depending on traffic.
To nitpick, O’Hare and Midway are technically both within Chicago city limits. As you can see, O’Hare is something of an island off the northwest corner of the city, but it is officially part of Chicago.
And while it’s true there’s not a convenient route between them by car, the two are only about 20 miles apart as the crow flies.
Yeah, i also don’t really understand why some people think it’s so significant that some city airports are technically outside city limits. Do you expect these airports to be located downtown, next to the tall buildings? It doesn’t change the fact that the airports serve the cities that they’re next to.
And it should also be pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about it why it might be best to have some physical separation between two places where large aircraft fly in and out.
<nitpick>
There is no Northwest Airlines. It’s all Delta.
</nitipick>
At the same time this brings up the conundrum that other airports cannot pick up slack because they are often at capacity themselves and may not even be able to service an airline with minimal to no presence at their location. For example, as correctly noted, O’Hare is a main hub for United. It’s kinda hard to reroute United traffic from O’Hare to MSP when United only has four gates assigned to that airline at MSP.
This.
I was under the impression that it’s a major cargo jet airport.
From passing by it on the train every day, I would think it’s quite busy, 24-7.
Any airport with only a single runway is little if you are using the number of runways as a measure of size. Most commercial, well-known airports have more than one.
VNY is large if you use the number of takeoffs & landings.
It is small if you use the number of passengers.
It is probably large if you use freight tonnage, as Belowjob2.0 points out.
And that’s exactly my point. A facility can be declared big or little depending on how you define the criteria for size.
MSP does take up the slack, but not in a way that would help O’Hare in this situation. It takes up the slack by serving as one of two major midwestern hubs for Delta, meaning that most Delta traffic that might be routed through ORD is instead routed via MSP (or DTW), reducing traffic at ORD. While that helps by balancing the load under normal conditions, as Duckster points out, it doesn’t help when, all of a sudden, United and American need to re-schedule and re-route hundreds of flights from ORD. MSP doesn’t have the capacity to absorb that much extra traffic, and American and United don’t have the facilities there to manage it.
Nevertheless, the existence of MSP definitely does make the experience at ORD better than it otherwise would be.
Midway’s not much of a technicality–it’s on the southwest side of the city, but there’s still two miles of city of the Chicago to the west of Midway.
O’hare is a bit more of technicality. The details can be found here.
LOL. My Garmin doesn’t even try. The “city” field when I drive by O’Hare is simply blank. 
But in this specific case, MSP wouldn’t have been a better choice than ORD anyway - we’d dug out of that same storm just yesterday. Whole airport was closed Saturday, so MSP was dealing with those cancellations.
Completely wrong. I could see you saying the city of Sea-Tac or Burien then I could understand the error but SeaTac is in fact in Seattle.
Wikipedia says it is in the city of Seatac and your own link says it is 13 miles south of Seattle.
Even a cursory glance at a map will show that Sea-Tac (actually located in a town named Seatac) is significantly closer to Seattle than to Tacoma. You can get there from downtown Seattle in maybe 20 minutes (if the road isn’t jammed).
But Minneapolis/St. Paul did have delays. My aunt flew out Sunday noon from MSP; her flight was delayed nearly 2 hours. And MSP was only about half working; roughly half of the flights were canceled.
It just wasn’t as big a problem as O’Hare, because MSP isn’t nearly as busy.
Sea-Tac the airport was built in unincorporated land just south of Seattle, but still within the same county. In 1990, part of that region incorporated into the city of Seatac. It’s quite a bit closer to Seattle than Tacoma. It’s possibly 13 miles south of downtown Seattle, but it’s only about three miles from the southern border of Seattle.
The other thing is that, because the current airport configuration is the result of a number of extensions over the years and not planned up front, the runway configuration at ORD is very messed up. Although it currently has 7 runways, there are many restrictions on their utilization due to the way they cross each other and the possible routes to and from the terminals. Yesterday was close to the worst case scenario: Very strong wind out of the north, low ceiling, plus snow on the runway. For much of the morning, they were down to a single runway only (32R), and they were able to start departing from another runway (32L) in the afternoon. This was a very suboptimal configuration and severely restricted the airport acceptance rate.
Van Nuys has 2 runways. 1 main, 1 secondary. It covers 730 acres. Just thought some facts might be helpful.
Oh, my flight out of O’Hare was delayed today because nobody could find the pilot.
No, seriously. It’s not that he was on a delayed flight. He simply wasn’t there.
Apparently United has no backup pilots in their biggest hub, so the flight was cancelled. Luckily, I wormed my way onto another.
