O’Hare International, one of the world’s most important airports, needs to plan for two new runways, expansion that is crucial for the health of the Midwest’s economy and essential if the United States is to head off the collapse of an expanding air passenger system.
After decades of debate, that reluctant consensus is emerging, despite the looming battle over projected costs, noise and environmental and engineering concerns.
“You can put 10,000 airplanes in the sky and bring them all to Chicago, but they’ve got to land,” said John Carr, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and a former journeyman controller for 10 years at the O’Hare tower.
“Until you get another piece of concrete, the planes are going about as quick as they can go.”
The stakes are high at a time when the airport is nearing capacity and demand is growing steadily.
O’Hare is a powerful economic magnet for the city and the region. That is a message well understood in Chicago, which traces much of its economic clout to the fact that every railroad of import laid its tracks through the region over a century ago, making the city a crucial transportation hub for everything moving east or west in the 19th Century.
The airport plays an analogous role in the modern era, a beacon to businesses looking for solid transportation links and also to exporters and importers searching for the landing space so crucial in a world economy that now prefers to ship billions of tons of goods by air.
Given those historical realities, and some pressure from the Federal Aviation Administration and national political leaders, the very Chicago officials who a year ago viewed “runway” as forbidden talk are developing proposals about where to pour the concrete and plotting what to do about the inefficient configuration of the current airport.
The details, where the devil lives in a proposal with such profound political and economic consequences, are still under debate.
And part of that debate must include making sure that O’Hare’s neighbors get something in the bargain. Though the airlines will reap the most benefits of new runways, they also must do more to minimize noise. City officials have the power to pressure the airlines to ensure that, and they must use it.
As a start, the addition of one runway would help reduce current delays, but would fall short of handling the numbers of passengers and flights expected in the near future, particularly the growth of international air traffic at what is likely to remain for decades the region’s dominant international airport.
Still, two runways could not be built at once, and by the time the first is constructed at O’Hare, circumstances may change, rendering the second unnecessary. Other, smaller regional airports, as well as a major third Chicago-area airport of the future, might begin to absorb the growing demand, or a slumping economy might reduce predictions about booming air traffic. In those cases, one runway might be enough, but prudence requires proceeding with plans for two.
Most experts expect that the demand for a second runway will be there. Already, the 46-year-old airport has surpassed the state’s estimate of its annual capacity for takeoffs and landings. It’s pushing close to the city’s higher capacity estimate of 946,000 takeoffs and landings a year. In 2000, O’Hare recorded 908,977 flights, and the FAA expects more than 993,000 flights in 2005. A design with two new runways would boost capacity, experts agree, to between 1.1 million and 1.2 million takeoffs and landings each year.
Two new runways could go in several spots at O’Hare. Depending on the placement of the new runways, an expansion plan might also mean dropping some of O’Hare’s existing seven runways and moving others, to rearrange the way planes come in and out. It’s the alignment of the runways, not the total number, that matters more.
Currently, most of the airport’s runways intersect–a factor that limits the number of planes that can take off and land at once. Experts agree that the additional runways should be aligned to increase the number of runways that are parallel to each other to three or even four.
Under a design many experts favor, authorities would build two new runways at the north and south edges of the airport, improve four existing runways and eliminate three others. The end result would be six runways–four of them parallel to each other, running east to west, at least 4,200 feet apart. Though that’s one less runway than O’Hare has now, that configuration would handle far more traffic.
Planes could land and take off simultaneously on all four in almost any weather condition, more than doubling the scenarios by which air-traffic controllers direct planes in and out. Tower officials take into account wind direction and the amount of air traffic when they decide which runways to open and close at various times of the day. Currently, they pick from 24 possible configurations. With four parallel runways, that playbook would expand to at least 50 such permutations.
The new runways, experts agree, would significantly reduce delays.
When weather is good, delays–often caused by overscheduled arrivals and departures during peak hours–would be cut by nearly half with four parallel runways, a 1994 analysis by a city consultant concluded. On stormy days, when low visibility now prompts runway closures, passengers would see an even bigger change: Delays would drop by more than 90 percent, the Landrum & Brown analysis said.
Some have argued that new O’Hare runways are too costly, but there is no simple way to calculate the general cost of building a new runway.
Runways have been built across the country for $175 million to $2 billion, including land-acquisition, soundproofing and other related costs, at airports in Minneapolis, Denver and St. Louis, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office. Those price tags, though, do not include the costs of accompanying legal battles.
In Dallas, a seventh runway at Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport cost $121 million, airport officials there said, although an additional $146 million was spent on soundproofing.
The only certainty is this: Costs depend on where the runways are and what they will replace. The complexity of required environmental studies varies widely, as do the costs of legal action that almost always sprouts from airport expansions.
In the case of O’Hare, many of those details are not yet known, including whether property would be needed outside the airport’s boundaries and how many homes and businesses would be affected.
The 1994 Landrum & Brown report estimated that a two-runway addition and a safety buffer might mean acquiring more than 300 acres of land outside the current airport and destroying more than 560 homes and businesses. A Bensenville water tower and a set of railroad tracks and water lines would also need to be removed, the report said.
For now, though, what the O’Hare expansion might wind up costing depends on whom you talk to–and comes with the baggage of how they feel about new runways. The estimates are vastly different.
U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) recently said it would cost $10 billion to build two runways at O’Hare. Fitzgerald, whose estimate was prepared by the Suburban O’Hare Commission, a critic of O’Hare expansion, included the cost of relocating several current runways.
Most experts dispute Fitzgerald’s estimates as absurdly high, noting that no airport in the country has ever cost anywhere near that much.
Fitzgerald has opposed new runways at O’Hare and argued that a starter airport at Peotone, consisting of one main runway and a 12-gate terminal, would be a better deal for taxpayers, costing about $600 million. If Peotone eventually were expanded to six runways, state officials say the total cost would run from $5 billion to $6 billion.
The Air Transport Association, which represents the major airlines, said a new 7,500-foot runway at O’Hare, which was proposed by a task force in 1991 and later shelved, would cost $2 billion, including the relocation of other runways, taxiways and support facilities. The task force, made up of city, state, federal and airlines officials, came together that year to study delays that already were mounting at Midway and O’Hare in the late 1980s.
Gerald Dillingham, the GAO’s director of civil aviation issues, said 24 airports are planning or constructing new runways and runway extensions at an estimated cost of $6.5 billion, although the final total is likely to be higher, depending on what problems arise. About 20 percent of the cost of adding runways would be funded by the federal government, with the rest being financed by revenue bonds, revenues from airport rentals for terminals and hangars, and fees often passed on to passengers, including landing fees.
The physical construction of a runway takes 18 months to about 2 1/2 years, but the entire process takes far longer–a decade on average, the FAA says. Construction itself, meanwhile, can create some new airplane delays, as runways open and close.
From planning to opening day, the process took 10 years in Dallas and Philadelphia, 16 years in Memphis. Once the decision is made to go forward, the slowest parts of runway construction are resolving legal battles and finishing the myriad environmental studies.
The FAA’s review process alone takes about three years. During that time, local airport planners work with the federal agency on a range of environmental, land-use and airspace issues. Among key tasks, workers conduct engineering studies to see how noise would carry from a new runway and how the proposed runway would mesh with other runways, airplane takeoffs and landings, and the paths of service vehicles, catering trucks and fuel trucks.
“Philadelphia started working on its new runway in 1989. I took over there in 1993 and spent three years dealing with two different regions of the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers and the FAA,” said Mary Rose Loney, who later became aviation commissioner in Chicago. The Philadelphia runway opened in 1999.
Around the country, 18 new runways are planned for major airports through 2010, FAA officials said. In an already crowded aviation industry where 675 million passengers rode airlines last year, and where a billion are projected in 2010, those new runways–though they’re not at some of the most delay-prone airports–should provide some relief to the entire system.
Still, complaints about the slowness of runway approval and construction have led federal officials to debate the notion of scaling back the entire process to five years. As early as this summer, the Bush administration is expected to act on a plan to streamline federal reviews. But the “fast-tracking” proposal itself is being delayed, some officials said, out of concern that the integrity of environmental reviews could be sacrificed for expediency.
For now, Chicago is not among the 18 cities on the FAA’s new-runway list. That’s because local officials haven’t agreed on a plan. In fact, Chicago officials have no master plan for the airport, aside from a stale plan from 1984. Among the tasks ahead, officials must answer the expansion critics. Chief among those: people who worry that more runways will only mean more planes at the airport, more cash for the airlines, more noise in the neighborhoods and, ultimately, more delays on their journeys.
Last month, a Tribune/WGN-TV poll found that about half of O’Hare-area residents would be willing to support new runways if the purpose was to ease delays and cancellations–not to add flights. But 76 percent of the respondents in 17 communities also said airport officials cannot be trusted to use the additional runway capacity only for reducing congestion.
The critics have a point. More runways likely will mean more airplanes and changes in flight patterns that increase noise over communities that didn’t have much of a problem before, while lessening the noise elsewhere.
But experts say city officials can handle that problem this way: Provide the carriers with runways and insist that the airlines minimize disruptions–both in terms of noise and delays. If negotiation fails, enact tougher measures, such as late-night flying bans, hefty fines or, as a last resort, the threat of seeking federal help to impose limits on the numbers of flights per hour.
The number of noise complaints from residents near O’Hare has fluctuated since airport officials launched a Fly Quiet program in 1997 that seeks the voluntary compliance of airlines to follow suggested tracks. A complaint hot line receives between 500 and 3,000 complaints a month, according to the city Aviation Department.
“You need to promise the people in the neighborhoods around the airports that the size of aircraft is going to go up and that you’re going to use the runways more efficiently and that all of these needs are going to be somehow balanced and simultaneously addressed,” said Claire Barrett, a Massachusetts-based airport consultant.
As the nation’s only airport that is a hub for two airlines, O’Hare serves 182 destinations and contributes about $30 billion annually in jobs and services to the economy of the metropolitan area, Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce officials say. But O’Hare’s capacity squeeze already has cost the airport new flights.
Though passenger demand grew 4 percent each year nationally during the past decade, O’Hare’s annual growth was only 2.6 percent during the same period. Statistics show that what could have been growth at O’Hare shifted to other Midwestern hub airports in Minneapolis, Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland and Cincinnati. Cincinnati’s passenger growth, for example, was 10 percent a year during the last decade, reflecting the move of many Delta Airlines flights from O’Hare because of the worsening congestion.
That is the flip side to any lingering doubts about new runways at O’Hare. If they’re not built, it is clear O’Hare’s future is threatened–and so is Chicago’s.
Current runways
O’Hare’s seven runways are assigned numbers relating to compass settings, with letters indicating left or right.
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Six of the seven are parallel pairs:
14L/32R and 14R/32L
9L/27R and 9R/27L
4L/22R and 4R/22L
And the north-south runway is 18/36
A refresher on the layout of O’Hare
Before O’Hare was officially opened in 1959, the site was known as Orchard Field and was part of the Douglas Aircraft Co. Three of O’Hare’s current runways–18/36, 14L/32R and 4L/22R–were adapted from the original field design.
Today, O’Hare’s seven runways intersect at seven points, which limits the airport’s ability to conduct simultaneous landings.
Runway proposal A
– Total runways: 6
Four would be east-west parallels; they are listed here from north to south:
%%
RUNWAY STATUS
New 10/28 Would be a newly built runway
9L/27R Rebuilt, moved north, lengthened
9R/27L Extended
New 9/27 Would be a newly built runway
Two 4/22 runways would be moved or improved:
RUNWAY STATUS
4L/22R Moved to the northwest
4R/22L Rebuilt
Runways that would be demolished:_14L/32R, 14R/32L, 18/36
%%
The ‘Quad Four’ plan: Creating-four east-west parallels
Runway 18/36 would be demolished because it is too short for jet traffic.
The plan calls for the construction of a northern east-west runway parallel to Touhy Avenue-(NEW 10/28 on the map) and a southern east-west runway near Irving Park Road (NEW 9/27 on the map). Also, existing runways 14L/32R and 14R/32L would be demolished.
Runway proposal B
– Total runways: 7
Three would be northwest-southeast parallel diagonals; listed here from north to south:
%% RUNWAY STATUS
14L/32R An existing runway
14R/32L An existing runway
New 14/32 A new runway
Three would be east-west parallel runways; listed here
from north to south:
RUNWAY STATUS
9L/27R Moved to the north
9R/27L An existing runway
New 9/27 A new runway
The seventh runway: An improved 4R/22L
Runways that would be demolished:_18/36, 4L/22R
%%
‘Paired Triples’: Two trios of parallels
This plan shares some aspects of the Quad Four plan: It would remove existing runway 18/36 and would also move 9L/27R several hundred feet north but would not lengthen it as much.
The plan would keep the existing diagonal pair of runways 14L/32R and 14R/32L (the longest current runway at 13,000 feet). It would also call for construction of two new runways at the southwest side of the airport (labeled NEW 14/32 and NEW 9/27 on map).
Sources: Chicago Department of Aviation documents,-Landrum & Brown
baiduhai/Jon Hilkevitch, John Schmeltzer,-Robert Dorrell and Chris Soprych
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A TRIBUNE SPECIAL SECTION: SOLUTIONS TO GRIDLOCK
Clearing the air
A blueprint for solving the crisis in U.S. air travel
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THE PROPOSALS
Add runways at O’Hare
Plan for 2, build at least 1. Perspective, Page 3
Create an air authority
1 team could marshal strengths of all region’s airports. Perspective, Page 3
Streamline air traffic control
FAA must react faster to change. Perspective, Page 5
Reduce overscheduling
Higher fees may open arteries. Perspective, Page 6
Greenlight Peotone
Yes to 3rd airport if the math works. Perspective, Page 7
Tap the regional airports
Down the road, airfields offer hidden capacity. Perspective, Page 8