Not just regional. Flew to SF out of Midway a while back – was cheaper, and the airport’s been updated. But it’s still smaller and quieter than ORD. Haven’t tried Rockford yet.
MKE was referred to by a travel agent as “a secret of budget travelers”. And it has a USED BOOKSTORE in the airport!!!
The bookstore gets it’s inventory from passengers stuck in ORD.
Not where I live!
Ooo! Airport questions!
Let me just say that a lot of good points were raised and it’s important to remember that there are multiple causes for O’Hare Mess.
Both Milwaukee and Chicago are subject to “lake effect” weather due to their proximity to Lake Michigan. Minneapolis/St Paul and Detroit much less so.
Though, really the Twin Cities were just as messed up from this storm, due to how the weather tracked.
This is definitely a major factor. When conditions are perfect the controllers basically have airplanes landing or taking off every 90 second from each active runway. When I use to fly over the city I always knew where O’Hare was in relation to my location because of the conga-lines of jets funneling into the big airport. That’s fine, when conditions are perfect. As we all know, the world is seldom perfect. This is a problem because the airlines schedule as if the conditions will always be perfect. When conditions aren’t you wind up with hundreds, even thousands of backed or canceled flights because when the weather is bad or equipment malfunctions airplanes need to be spaced further apart for safety reasons.
I realize it’s annoying to have your flight delayed or canceled, but having flaming aluminum raining out of the sky would really ruin your day. Especially if you were on the now dis-assembled, burning aircraft, but even if you were on the ground you’d need more than the typical umbrella to keep the debris at bay.
I’d say it was already a problem in the 1990’s, but has only gotten worse with a brief reprieve post 9/11.
The airlines had to be forced into that by the FAA, they didn’t do it willingly. They even tried to challenge it in court if I recall correctly but the FAA used the magic word “safety” to ram it through. Please, don’t give the airlines that much credit, they don’t deserve it.
I will note that said project will only result in a net addition of 2 runways, with the overwhelming majority of runways running directly east-west. This is fine for normal conditions but as we all know conditions aren’t always normal. In a storm like we recently had, with the wind out of almost due north, this would actually be a worse configuration than the current set-up, which gives more options for different wind directions even if you can’t use as many runways at once under any condition. (If anyone needs more explanation just say so – either one of the other pilots or I can answer your questions. It has to do with crosswinds.)
If I recall correctly (it has been a few years since I was actively flying and most of my references are now in storage) there are multiple airports in the area with 10,000 foot runways (Rockford and South Bend), and many more with shorter runways that can handle the smaller commercial airplanes (Gary airport, for example, has a runway longer than any of those available at Midway and can handle, at least the take-off and landing part, any aircraft that flies through Midway). True, when the weather is crap the others are often snowed in… but not always. However, there are additional obstacles to their use ranging from political (Chicago really, really wants to hang onto any money generated by aviation in the area) to security concerns (the alternatives have few or no TSA agents and are not set up to screen massive numbers of passengers, and secured areas to keep airplanes are limited) to logistical problems (may not have the capacity to fuel and de-ice a lot of airplanes and so forth). As a practical matter, although the runways exist and are usable other factors make it easier to cancel or delay flights than to re-route them to surrounding airports.
Now, in a national emergency you can plunk airplanes down all over. We saw that happen on 9/11. Airplanes were landing in Podunk, Everywhere and smaller airports were seeing some airplanes that, frankly, surprised the locals that something that big could get into their little fields. Those that could be parked on grassy areas were, and the rest on top of every available scrap of pavement. Those same airplanes, though, later demonstrated a lot of the logistical issues I mentioned. A LOT of extra fuel shipments had to be made to Podunk, Everywhere, there weren’t the facilities at all those small fields to handle massive numbers of passengers, security was jury-rigged, catering had to be trucked in along with maintenance crews… it took quite awhile to sort everything out, and it cost some money to do it. It also involved delays considerably longer than a day or two to sort out.
Unless, of course, the winds decide not to go in the prevailing direction, which does happen fairly regularly which is why quite a few airports have intersecting runways. During our recent storm, for example, the winds were howling directly out of the north. That rendered east-west runways useless because a direct crosswind of, say, 45 mph, is getting into not-safe territory even for large airplanes, and we had gusts clocking 60 mph (Gary airport reported a gust of 66 mph during the storm). You don’t want that hitting perpendicular to the airplane during take off or landing, it’s much too exciting, really. On the other hand, you can land one of the big airplanes directly into a 45 mph wind. The more directly the runway lines up with the wind at the time of landing the better, with the flip side being a runway perpendicular to the wind might be OK with a gentle breeze but it will be rendered useless much sooner than one that lines up with the wind.
(Back when I was based at Palwaukee we had a business jet attempt a take-off with a direct 45 mph crosswind. That is, the wind was perpendicular to the airplane’s route of travel. The wind flipped them before the wheels ever left the ground and they cartwheeled down the pavement, through the airport fence, through an earthen berm, up a hill, over a road (the only time they actually were, briefly, airborne), through some more field, and parts (some of them - a lot were left stuck in the runway pavement) coming to a halt in the parking lot of an apartment complex, some nicely ablaze. OK, you really want to be careful about cross wind take offs in high winds. It’s that whole “flaming pieces of aircraft really ruin your day” thing all over again.)
When there are high winds you might see O’Hare open and Midway closed or vice versa depending on wind direction. Midway has intersecting runways on “diagnonals” - NW to SW, and NE to SE. So if the wind is directly out of the north Midway’s runways will only have a partial crosswind component, allowing them to remain in use with a higher wind, than will O’Hare’s east-west runways. On the other hand, if the wind is from the NW then Midway’s NE-SE runway may be off limits but O’Hare’s east-west ones still open for business. Midway will never have more than one of it’s runways active, but it will have one or the other almost all of the time. If O’Hare moves to exclusively east-west runways then most of the times it will have more runways in use but there will be days that, due to wind conditions, they will all be taken out of operation… and the general public will wonder why the hell we spent billions to “improve” O’Hare and it’s shut down while ancient Midway still has flights going in and out.
Um… I’m sorry, but Midway is very much in “Chicago proper” unless you somehow thing the south side is in another location than “Chicago”. O’Hare was put way the hell in the middle of nowhere so (in theory) it could expand, which worked until people built up stuff all around it right to the airport fence. (Midway also has that problem, and did at the time they planned O’Hare, which is why they tried to located O’Hare way the hell out in open fields.) And yes, O’Hare is part of Chicago via blatant gerrymandering, but hey, we are talking about Chicago here.
Actually, Chicago used to have an airport right in the Loop, yes, next to the tall buildings, but then Mayor Daley bulldozed it in the middle of the night without telling anyone. Let’s not go there again. But in fact there are several airports around the world, some of the quite major, that are in fact located in major cities in amongst skycrapers. They frequently are located in bodies of water adjacent to the big buildings (Meigs Field and LaGuardia in New York City are the first that occur to me, but there are others). Of course, there are additional potential risks with such locations, which is why municipalities try to locate new airports outside of city limits.
I had always been under the impression that Chicago and Milwaukee, being on the western shore of the lake (unlike, say, Buffalo), were not very susceptible at all to lake effect snow.
An airport project in Peotone, well south of Chicago, has long been touted as a relief valve for O’Hare and Midway. It’s been in planning hell for decades. Looking at the Wikipedia article here it looks like a runway expansion project at the Gary-Chicago airport might just eliminate the need for a brand new airport in Peotone, and would be much closer to the main part of the city anyhow.
It’s a fantastic book store, with a most eclectic selection. It holds about 60,000 volumes.
Renaissance Books. Its parent store in downtown Milwaukee is an amazingly ramshackle 5 story building literally crammed nearly to bursting with books. Enough to warp spacetime, so if you go in, you never know when or where you’ll end up coming out.
Ook.
I’m not sure this is really the problem wrt Chicago airports. Instead, I beieve it is more like NIYBY.
Despite the fact that the Chicago metro area is essentially an unbroken from somewhere in NW IN through Milwaukee, I have seen very little effort to address air travel as a regional problem.
OHare is horrible, but it is a cash cow and the city of Chicago and state of IL have historically opposed any efforts to divert any traffic to regional airports such as Rockford or Milw. And you still hear folk advocating a new airport somewhere in the fields way south of Chicago - instead of the far more sensible approach of expanding Gary, which is far closer, in an area which would benefit from development, and which would not involve paving farmland. (Of course, NW IN got SOCKED in the recent storm, which would have rendered Gary of little use…)
Consider the former Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong, notorious for scary landings until the new airport opened on a landfill “island”: Kai Tak Airport - Wikipedia
Some videos:
It doesn’t happen here nearly as often as it does in Buffalo (or, for Lake Michigan, northwestern Indiana), since winds don’t come out of the east as often as they come out of the north or west, but it does happen. Usually, however, in Chicago, it’s more of a situation in which easterly winds, associated with an already-existing snowstorm, enhance the snowfall in areas near the lake.
One of the reaons that O’Hare has not been able to expand into what a lot of people seem to think is simply some open space, or, at best, some sleepy little suburbs, is that there is a cemetery at one edge of the airport. This is not, then, simply a spat between civic jurisdictions or an us vs. them matter, but for a number of people who have loved ones buried there, it’s a significant matter. How many dopers would be just fine having their parents, grandparents, ancestors, etc. “sensitively” dug up and moved someplace else? At some point in the past, O’Hare was ORD, mainly a military field, and the area was the far boonies. Midway was the main (only) Chicago airport. Now that everything has expanded, there’s a significant snag - all of which is on top of, or aside from, the various political complications that ensue when Chicaga has its finger in the pie. But it’s not an insignificant matter, it’s been in the courts for a long time, and for those folks who say Just expand the field, it’s not that easy because of those pesky “human” factors, like respect for the dead and their families.
Not true at all! He told the guys on the bulldozers… 
Is this why Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas are the busiest airports despite them not being the biggest cities? LA is 4th so I’m guessing it’s location on the coast makes it a bad place to be a hub. Plus we have like 4 or 5 airports in this area
SFO (San Francisco) is a hub for United, along with DEN, ORD and IAD, so being on the Pacific coast is not the only factor here. For United, SFO can serve north-south connections on the West coast, as well as links to Asia and Australia.
I am tired of the NIMBY attitude when it comes to O’Hare. Bunch of whiny, bitchy suburbs hold one of the biggest cities in the US and its main transport hub hostage to their whining.
Those cities would not be there if not for the airport and the city of Chicago. Indeed the airport brought all sorts of opportunity for businesses which moved close and people moved nearby to work.
Ever see your baggage ticket when going to O’Hare? Ever wonder why it says ORD instead of something more sensible like, say, CHI? (E.g. Los Angeles is LAX…easy.)
It is because O’Hare airport was built in an orchard. See the map linked earlier? O’Hare airport is off to the side like an island because they knew being next to an airport sucks so they put it off away from everything. The vast majority of what hems in the airport today was not there when it was built.
Now, if you have a house and someone plops a massive airport next to you I can see room for complaint. But if you buy your house next to an airport that is already there I have no sympathy. Willing to bet you got a good deal on it and if you don’t like it find somewhere else to live. No one makes you buy a house under an air route.
There are a lot of large airports in the LA area. Long Beach, Los Alimitos, Ontario, Van Nuys, Burbank… It’s a dense aviation corridor.
While the prevailing wind across North America is westerly, the wind is not always from the west. Chicago does not get as much lake effect snow as Buffalo but most definitely the lake does affect the weather.
Not only that, it would be relatively trivial to run a spur to the Gary airport to tie it into the South Shore and South Bend Railroad which has been providing train travel between Northern Indiana and Chicago for over a century now. Which would make it very accessible to the city.
Then you just have to convince the airlines to use the airport.
The city of Chicago is already in a joint agreement with the city of Gary to run that airport - in other words, Daley stuck a finger in that pie already.
The problem with expanding Gary is the need to move a railway, but that is feasible.
As O’Hare and Midway also got socked in during the very same storm I don’t see where it would have made a difference. This time.
So wackypedia is a better cite than half a dozen official or semi-official webpages I can pull up in 2 seconds? Let’s see what the Port of Seattle says. Scroll down for the physical address. The situation is similar to Denver International. The city is gerrymandered so that despite being 10 miles away fron Denver, the airport is in the city of Denver. SeaTac is the same way.