ATW Daily News

New runways open at three US airports

Friday November 21, 2008

New runways at Chicago O'Hare, Washington Dulles and Seattle-Tacoma International opened yesterday in time for the busy Thanksgiving holiday travel period. According to the US Dept. of Transportation, the runways will allow "for an additional 330,000 takeoffs and landings each year." Cost of the runways was more than $2 billion, including $643 million in federal Airport Improvement Program funds.

The opening of the ORD runway, 9L-27R, is a major milestone in the O'Hare Modernization Program and is expected to offer increased capacity when landing west. According to Airports Council International-North America, the 7,500-ft. runway will be used primarily as a bad-weather arrival runway. It is a Group 5 CAT II/III Runway and is supported by a new air traffic control tower. Citing FAA, ACI-NA said delays will be reduced from today's average of 24 min. to 16 min. per flight, especially in bad weather, while adding 52,000 flights annually.

The new Dulles runway, 1L/19R, is 9,400 ft. in length. According to DOT, it potentially will accommodate 100,000 additional annual aircraft operations and decrease the average delay per operation by 2.5 min. Documents obtained by ATWOnline from one airport user, however, suggest the gain may be somewhat smaller as use of 1L/19R is limited by the conflict between 1L/19 and 12/30, while the taxiway to the new runway conflicts with operations on another runway and generates "volume issues on the south end of the airport." New taxiways set to open in 2009 will help to alleviate this congestion. It will be used, according to the documents, primarily as an offload runway.

The new parallel runway at SeaTac, 16R/34L, will result in increased arrival and departure conditions because existing parallel runways are too close to one another to allow for simultaneous operations.

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