Newsstand - Chicago mayor submits plan for O'Hare

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Mayor Richard Daley submitted a $6.6 billion expansion plan for O'Hare Airport to federal review Monday, saying the time is right even if airlines and the economy are in a slump.

The plans submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration include a re-arrangement of the runways to reduce delays, construction of an additional terminal, and the building of a new link to the area's commuter rail service.

http://www.cnn.com/2002/TRAVEL/12/24/ohare.expansion.ap/index.html

I would rather renovate Midway. We may not have much business at O'Hare with UA and AA in financial trouble.

If both UA and AA downsize there may not be much need for an additional runway and more terminal improvements.

Good luck!

ORD needs to be reconfigured -- it can't cope with bad weather well, since it is three pairs of real runways (I'll ignore 17-35, too short to be useful) that cross each other. It's workable, sort of, in clear skies, but when visibility drops, it becomes a mess.

6 parellel and 2 crosswind would certainly increase capacity -- but even if they dropped a runway, and rebuilt it to four parellel and two crosswinds, it would become a much more reliable airport.

The real kicker is when winds demand that ORD work the 14R-L pair. When that happens, MDW must use 13C -- and the 14R-L "go around" traffic has to dodge MDW arrival traffic.

Expanding MDW is basically impossible -- it's in the middle of a very dense urban area and ORD's class B airspace.

Paving over crack houses and abandoned properties would certainly cost less than $6.6 billion.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Tino:
Paving over crack houses and abandoned properties would certainly cost less than $6.6 billion. </font>

Ha, ha - not anymore! You can only WISH the crack houses were that cheap. Real estate in Chicago is incredibly expensive anymore. And abandoned property is not abandoned for long anymore.