One day after landmark legislation to expand O’Hare International Airport was signed with great fanfare, the federal government on Thursday sent the plan back to the city for major corrections in the design of the airfield’s taxiways.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that without changes, the taxiway layout would not come close to producing the promised 95 percent reduction in flight delays during bad weather, a key reason the city has pushed for airport expansion.
The FAA study also warned that the O’Hare plan would result in a potentially dangerous situation of planes taxiing 1,000 times a day across the airport’s longest and busiest runway if a new western terminal opened before that runway was demolished. The findings highlight the difficulty of building a new airport within an operating one.
The report is the FAA’s initial response to Chicago’s airport layout plan for revamping O’Hare. The agency suggested it was possible to remedy the problems and urged the city to rethink portions of the airfield layout.
In the expansion plan, significantly more aircraft would taxi across runways on the reconfigured airfield, dragging down the number of flights by slowing takeoffs and landings during low visibility to safeguard against collisions with the taxiing planes.
City projections of 242 planes an hour taking off and landing to the east during poor weather were too high, concluded the FAA, which said 176 flights is a more accurate estimate. But O’Hare now accommodates an average of 156 flights an hour in poor weather, renewing questions about whether the $6.6 billion airfield modernization will yield major benefits.
“We expect the city to analyze our comments, make changes and resubmit the airport layout document to us,” said FAA spokesman Tony Molinaro.
The report presented a fresh challenge to the Daley administration, which on Wednesday celebrated the enactment of legislation protecting the airport expansion. Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a bill cementing the project and its controversial land-acquisition provisions.
City aviation officials said their consultants are already working with the FAA to correct the flaws.
“We think there are ways to mitigate the problems and we hope to get back to the FAA with a revised set of plans in several months,” said Ramon Ricondo, president of Ricondo & Associates, the city’s main consultant on O’Hare. “But the FAA’s comments clearly show they did not find any show-stoppers.”
But expansion opponents said the FAA study confirms their view that the O’Hare plan is a flop, logistically and financially.
“The FAA is giving us some credibility,” said Elk Grove Village Mayor Craig Johnson. “We’ve said all along the runway layout would never provide the advertised capacity gains in bad weather. It will lead to a nightmare of more delays and a much more dangerous situation for airplanes.”
The FAA report uncovered no major operational issues in good weather, agreeing with the city’s capacity forecasts of 280 flights an hour, up from 200 an hour on the current intersecting runways. The agency found no problems with city estimates in reduced visibility when most O’Hare traffic is landing and taking off to the west.
But troubles arose in the analysis when most airplanes are taking off and landing to the east during poor weather. The airspace between Chicago and the East Coast is the most crowded in the U.S.
Under such conditions on the current airfield, O’Hare accommodates an average of 78 takeoffs and 78 landings an hour. The city and its consultants had forecast 117 planes could land and 125 planes depart each hour after the airfield is reconfigured.
But the FAA analysis disagreed, finding the capacity would be limited to 88 arrivals and 88 departures hourly–a small gain over today’s conditions.
“For $6 billion, the city isn’t getting much more capacity. It would be much cheaper and just about as effective to leave the existing airfield intact and add one runway,” said Craig Burzych, O’Hare president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
“Runway incursions are the leading cause of accidents and a big concern for us. When you ask Mayor Daley about O’Hare expansion, he doesn’t talk about the safety of the flying public. The first words out of his mouth are the 195,000 jobs that will be created.”
Ricondo agreed with the FAA assessment that the 13,000-foot runway near the new western terminal “becomes an impediment to airplanes on the ground taxiing” between the terminal and other runways. Some of the new gates at the western terminal are scheduled to open in 2009, but the runway would remain active until 2013. The result would be aircraft taxiing across the runway 1,000 times a day, the FAA said.
Balancing the construction timetable creates a dilemma. The airlines will need at least some of the roughly 55 aircraft gates that would serve the western terminal, but they also would need to use the runway, especially when other runways are under construction.
Ricondo said his team is studying how to change the phasing of construction to enhance airfield safety without putting O’Hare into a deeper capacity crunch during the work. One option calls for shortening the 13,000-foot runway so taxiing planes could be routed around it instead of across.
The consultant is also looking at alternatives to relocate other taxiways to minimize the number of runway crossings, he said.
The expansion plan calls for six east-west parallel runways, requiring planes to taxi across the runways going to and from terminals. The current runway configuration, while less efficient, leaves room for most planes to taxi around runways.
In addition, the FAA asked Chicago to decide if it will pursue a recommendation by air-traffic controllers to realign the proposed far southern runway. The city devised the runway as the sixth east-west runway in the plan, but the FAA said it might produce better efficiencies to angle the runway.
Meanwhile, Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.), who last year stalled legislation supporting the expansion plan in Congress, said he planned to block efforts by the airline industry, including United Airlines, to stretch out payments to their companies’ pension funds.
United is pushing for the measure, Fitzgerald said, as a way to pay its share of the O’Hare project, a claim United officials denied. But the senator said because United is so deep in debt in paying off the pension, the airline wants the break from the federal government.
“United cannot both pay its employee pensions and pay the debt service on Mayor Daley’s bonds” for O’Hare, Fitzgerald said at a Chicago news conference. “They can do one or the other, but not both.”
In its latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, United estimated its pensions were underfunded by $6.4 billion. .
Officials from United and an independent airline analyst agreed that Fitzgerald’s proposed maneuver would likely have little impact on United’s ability to pay its share of airport expansion costs, mostly because United must resolve the pension issue when it exits federal bankruptcy protection, likely early next year.
