A new runway opened at O'Hare this morning, and the Sun-Times can't understand why:
At a cost of $516 million, a new O’Hare International Airport runway opens this week with so little predicted use — initially 5 percent of all flights — that some question its bang for the buck.
Runway 10R-28L should increase efficiency and arrival capacity when jet traffic moves from west to east — now about 30 percent of the time, officials say. That boost will be especially large during low visibility and critical during peak hours, they contend.
Well, yes, on average it will handle 5% of flights. But it will handle most of those flights during periods of low visibility, when the flights would otherwise be stacked up all the way to Janesville. In other words, the new runway boosts capacity at O'Hare when it's most needed (during bad weather) and doesn't actually hurt anything when it's not needed.
The Sun-Times goes on to quote critics of the new runway who, perhaps not being pilots or aviation engineers, want to lengthen the diagonal runways that cross the east-west runways already in place. Since crossing runways increases the separation between planes on approach, extending 4R/22L and 4L/22R would do nothing to alleviate delays during low visibility.
The Sun-Times own graphic shows that the 5% figure is quite a different story when you look at all of the runways together.
I'm happy for the increased capacity. It should cut weather-related delays at O'Hare significantly, though I'm not wild about the 20-minute taxi time, and I understand residents of Wood Dale and Bensenville aren't wild about the noise.