As winter approached last November, about 300 truck drivers and other city workers assigned to O’Hare International Airport gathered for the annual “Snow Blast,” a combination party/pep rally designed to fortify them for the battle that lay ahead.
City Aviation Commissioner David Mosena thanked the troops in advance for their work to keep the world’s busiest airport functioning no matter how ferocious Mother Nature’s assault and, at the end of his little address, declared, “Let it snow!”
Whereupon the gathered throng started pounding on tables, chanting “Snow! Snow! Snow!”
Barring a late storm, travelers have made it through yet another winter season with no more than a routine amount of delay, thanks in part to the determined efforts of the snow fighters, in part to what officials say has been moderate weather.
But with a traffic load as heavy as O’Hare’s, a “routine amount” means thousands of delays. And in a climate like Chicago’s, snow is only one of the weather-related conditions that causes planes-and passengers-to stack up.
There are also freezing rain, thunderstorms, high winds and, as travelers who journeyed to the airport discovered this week, there’s fog, too.
Bad weather has forced officials to shut O’Hare entirely only a handful of times in the three decades the airport has been Chicago’s main aviation hub. But flight delays are an entirely different matter.
O’Hare had 38,253 delays last year, affecting millions of passengers, and 80 percent were caused by weather, according to Federal Aviation Administration statistics. By comparison, weather accounted for 54 percent of delays nationally.
But because of the way the FAA counts delays, O’Hare’s numbers reflect only a fraction of what travelers would consider to be late flights.
On departures, for example, the agency starts keeping track only after controllers give permission for a plane to pull away from the gate. That means a flight might not be counted as late even though passengers may be sitting at gates hours after the published flight time.
Airline operators have differing views on the worst type of weather conditions here.
For Jack Frawley, Chicago operations manager for American Airlines, it’s freezing rain, a relatively uncommon phenomenon here that can strike (as it did in January) when the temperature is between 28 and 33 degrees.
New FAA regulations, imposed after last year’s crash of a USAir jet in New York, require more frequent aircraft de-icing than previously, and schedules can take a beating as a result.
And runways, which can’t be salted because of the damaging effect on jet engines, must be bathed in an ethylene glycol-based chemical when there is ice.
Next on Frawley’s list is fog or heavy rain or snow that severely reduces visibility and, thus, the ability of the air traffic control system to handle the normal load of flights.
On Wednesday, visibility at O’Hare was reported down to a mere three-quarters of a mile, and scores of flights were delayed.
This kind of weather requires “a greater separation on final approach from one airplane to the next,” Frawley said. “You have to make certain planes can be seen and get them off the runway before you can clear the next one to land.”
That means delays.
In Tom Powers’ judgment, the worst kind of weather is yet to come this year-thunderstorms.
“When those storm cells are out in this geographical area, you can’t get clearance through,” said Powers, Chicago-based regional vice president for United Airlines. Planes have to be rerouted and, altogether too often, suffer delays.
O’Hare’s weather-related problems would be much less pronounced, Chicago’s climate notwithstanding, were it not for the sheer volume of flights the airport handles. The impact of any bit of bad weather is magnified, producing a domino effect on planes coming in and going out.
Last year, the airport tallied 860,000 flights, an all-time high.
At the same time, inclement weather in Chicago sometimes is blamed by travelers for delays that have nothing to do with problems at O’Hare.
Scores of flights were canceled and delayed on the snowy weekend of March 14-15, but only because of a huge storm that shut down airports on the East Coast. A flight from New York to Chicago to Denver isn’t going to get out of O’Hare on time if the plane doesn’t leave LaGuardia.
If Powers could move another area’s climate to Chicago, he’d grab the warm, dry stuff in the Southwest.
But Frawley says that virtually every airport in North America has its own delay-producing problems, regardless of location.
In Las Vegas, intense heat sometimes slows operations, he said, while bad weather from the Gulf of Mexico brings violent summer thunderstorms to Dallas-Ft. Worth International. Miami has thunderstorms year-round, and Los Angeles has fog and an airfield layout with four runways in the same direction, something that limits operations under certain weather conditions, Frawley added. (O’Hare has six runways configured in various directions.)
The city contracts with a private forecasting service and weather radar service to keep O’Hare officials abreast of approaching weather conditions, and the major airlines share information from their own sophisticated weather-reporting systems, said Charles Meyer, the city’s acting chief at the airport.
New within the last year has been a computerized system, with sensors imbedded in the runways, that gives pavement and air temperature and helps crews know when to de-ice, Meyer said.
And passengers at O’Hare may suffer fewer weather-related delays in the future if proposed improvements to the field, including a new runway, are made, according to airline officials. Suburban leaders, fearful that expanded concrete would lead to more flights and more noise, view these possibilities warily. They promise a knockdown fight against any new runway unless irrevocable guarantees are provided that it be used only to reduce delays.
Meanwhile, airline executives say that new-generation air traffic control equipment that would improve operations in bad weather is expected in a modern tower planned for O’Hare and in a new FAA approach control facility slated for Elgin.
“Global positioning” satellites, which can pinpoint the location of every plane and service vehicle on an airfield even under the worst visibility conditions, also offer hope for future delay relief, experts say.
But in the meantime, travelers simply will have to keep fingers crossed on the days they’re scheduled to use O’Hare.
As the old saying goes, you can’t do anything about the weather.
