When the weather here in Chicago is bad, all hell breaks loose. The winds are the worst because they will prevent the use of the 5 parallel runways, forcing everything to the north/south diagonals.

But what is just as bad (and what you experienced) is when weather in the area restricts the departure fixes. If there is a storm over one of the main fixes, they have to route the planes over other ones, leading to even more spacing issues. If for example, the Tokyo bound flight needs to cross the airfield after takeoff from Rwy 10L, it basically shuts down any activity on the north half of the airfield until it clears its fix.

As for the far south runway, I was there when they opened 10R, it is only used when landing to the east but the max taxi time from runway end to the farthest UA gates on the north side was modeled at 25 minutes. You have to go around the end of the runways, rather than through them. This is how they keep the runway throughput up. It sucks, but airlines will gladly burn the fuel on a taxi rather than a holding pattern.

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Posted by CuseTiger

On the road

Member since Jul 2013

8466 posts

Posted on 8/10/16 at 12:31 pm to SM6

quote:
But what is just as bad (and what you experienced) is when weather in the area restricts the departure fixes. If there is a storm over one of the main fixes, they have to route the planes over other ones, leading to even more spacing issues. If for example, the Tokyo bound flight needs to cross the airfield after takeoff from Rwy 10L, it basically shuts down any activity on the north half of the airfield until it clears its fix.

This is what we were told on the plane. The storm system wasn't over Chicago but over the lake to the east and southeast. Departures on 10L were every 3-5 minutes instead of the usual 1 minute. I've realized O'hare ops go severely downhill when 22L is not used for departures due to weather.

quote:
As for the far south runway, I was there when they opened 10R, it is only used when landing to the east but the max taxi time from runway end to the farthest UA gates on the north side was modeled at 25 minutes.

Think it took us 20 minutes that day after landing at 2:14pm on 10C, here's the flight path for the DCA-ORD Flightaware

Here's us just getting out in time