IAD Ops during snow
 

I've got a trip booked CLT-IAD-DEN in F this Friday morning. Looking at the weather forecast, I see IAD is in line for "potentially significant snow accumulation" that day. I don't transit through IAD much, and I'm wondering if this is a recipe for disaster.

For any IAD regulars, how well is snow/winter weather handled in IAD? I've got a 2:15 layover between flights and am on the first flight out of CLT Friday morning. Any reason for concern? I've booked the trip using Aeroplan miles so am not too flexible for changes.

From my experience, IAD does not handle any weather related issues well. A couple inches will definently slow things down and 4 inches can close it down. That being said, the best you can hope for is some delays both in and out of IAD>

It's not that IAD doesn't handle snow well, it's that the Capital Region doesn't handle snow well. DC area is notorious for not being able to move snow on the roads, so many airline and airport employees can't get to the airport to help. There are multiple instances in the past five years of major traffic standstills during snow that cause people to abandon their cars (even on the Dulles toll road!).

It's too early to say what Friday's weather will bring to DC. We've gone over 2 years without a 2+ inch snowstorm, and right now they're calling for possibly 1-2 inches (and maybe nothing at all).

I'm flying Friday evening and am a bit concerned since I don't have a lot of buffer to fall back on should there be significant delays--if they issue a weather waiver, I'll try for earlier in the day just to stay on the safe side... but as of right now, I'm not expecting the worst.

palmetto86,
You are right on. Much more detail.

Agree. of the 3 DC area airports, IAD ususally is the only one that can keep at least one runway open. I've flown out of IAD for 20 years, and I've never had a flight cancelled due to snow. Delay - now that's another story. ;)

Sadly, you are correct on all counts.

You must have luckily avoided flying during the big storms in 2010 and 2011. :D To be fair, I don't think any airport could have handled the 30+ inches of snow from the Snowpocalypse or Snowmaggeddon storms.

I got stuck in ORD in 2009 due to a WAS-area storm; they had canceled everything into IAD, DCA, and BWI (and I couldn't make standby on a flight to RIC--the only one remotely in the region which operated that day). Fortunately, by the following day, the airports were open again and they even ran two extra 777 sections from ORD-IAD to take up the slack.

The fact that they are considering one to three inches of snow (at least on the sites that are giving an estimate) potentially significant should pretty much answer your question. They don't handle it well at all.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9800; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.1+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.246 Mobile Safari/534.1+)

Too early to know anything. Last week for instance they were predicting up to 5 inches - what did DC get? Nothing.

Thanks for the replies everyone. Obviously it's still too early to tell, but I'll keep my eyes on it and try to make alternate plans if necessary. I think being on the 6:00am UAX flight to IAD can't hurt, as that aircraft arrives the night before and stuff isn't usually TOO messed up first thing in the morning operations-wise. If IAD does happen to close overnight though, well, that's another thing. I'll take delays on the second leg of a trip over cancellations any day!

Sometimes just the threat of snow in advance of a storm can shut things down prematurely in the DC area.

I've avoided IAD for connections in the past, as even on good days, it's a mess. UA also allows booking options with extremely tight connections there (MUC to IAD to SEA with 1 hr 25 minutes - ran like a madman!). Your connection time looks fine, but I would consider avoiding the connection altogether and going from CLT to DEN nonstop. US has five flights from CLT to DEN and UA obviously goes through ORD. If connecting, I've found CLT to be easier than IAD.

IAD get alot more snow than DC proper.

The airport can handle it....though it still could cause delays more due to de-icing requirements than necessarily the snow.

If the forecast say 6+ inches its quite likely United posts a waiver on rerouting of the flights through IAD so you can easily reroute your trip through ORD or IAH.

Among many other things. :D