O'Scare Airport

[marmar]

from the Chicago Tribune:



The almost-completed first phase of O'Hare International Airport's expansion had close calls that could have resulted in fatal airplane crashes, according to a Tribune investigation of incidents filed with the Federal Aviation Administration.

As the Chicago Department of Aviation prepares to start the next phase of rebuilding at O'Hare next month, the reports on the incidents spotlight the challenges of conducting a complicated airport modernization program on a busy airfield. They also show how an ever-changing list of alerts to pilots, air traffic controllers and construction crews increases the opportunity for serious mistakes, including planes taking off and landing on closed runways.

The potential for disaster has prompted the FAA to begin revising its daily alerts to pilots about airfield conditions and other procedures. Work to build a runway in the southern part of O'Hare will kick into high gear now that the city and the major airlines have agreed on the project after a legal battle. City officials say the work at the airport had met FAA safety standards but acknowledge that more can be done to improve safety.

One close call linked to the O'Hare expansion project took place Sept. 9, 2009. Construction work was going on all over O'Hare when a FedEx plane taxied out for departure that evening. After making a preflight check of the MD10 cargo plane's weight, the winds and the length of the runway, the pilots concluded they were too heavy to take off from the 8,075-foot runway that was assigned, according to the FAA. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/traffic/ct-met-getting-around-0328-20110327,0,438868.column

[mn9driver]

1. The problem isn't the construction.

It is how information about the runway and taxiway closures is disseminated. These "Notices to Airmen" (NOTAMS) are poorly formatted, use hundreds of arcane abbreviations, and can take up 4 or 5 FEET of single-spaced dot-matrix printout that has to be reviewed by pilots who have only a few minutes before evey departure. The next 4 or 5 feet needs to also be reviewed for the arrival and then for the alternate airports, prior to every single flight. Notices about current runway closures are mixed in with notices about rough pavement, future events, airspace changes, burned out light bulbs, snow conditions and deer sightings, to name just a small fraction.

It's no wonder that really important information gets missed, both by pilots and controllers. It happens dozens if not hundreds of times every day, at many more fields than just O'Hare. We are using 75 year old technology in an aviation environment that is vastly more complicated, time constrained and demanding than anything this antique system was ever designed for.

[damntexdem]

2. "It changes the traffic patterns that pilots may be accustomed to"

Yeah, having construction vehicles driving across a runway one is landing on, or taking off from, will do that.