How does ORD handle winter weather?
 

Have a flight booked into ORD this Thursday on AA, making an international connection on EK. Left plenty of time (7 hours), but looks like the updated forecast is calling for snow (little accumulation, but still...). Anyone had experience with flying into ORD during winter weather? Oddly enough, I've flown through there so many times but haven't experienced any weather there.

I do have a backup plan in case the forecast gets much worse: WN flight to MDW night before+hotel.

Thoughts? Advice? Thanks.

As long as it isn't a blizzard ORD should be fine.

A concern is always 2nd order effects from snow delays at other airports, foe example your plane to ORD starts the day at LGA, you may be in for some excitment.

How does ORD handle winter weather?
 

Even in the extreme weather that Chicago faces sometimes I found they give international airlines a higher priority when they can. I lived there for 10yrs and traveled extensively through the winter. Most recent disaster was last year during the "polar vortex" where it was something like -10°f and blizzarding. All UA/AA outbound domestic and Int'l flights were cancelled a day in advance but my OS flight to Vienna took off on time (had to de-ice twice due to the extreme cold though) but we got out while none of the domestics did. While waiting to board in T5 I noticed LH/QR/EK/AI and others coming in or going out as well. I will mention I did see UA/AA coming IN at T5 from overseas but knew that T1/T2/T3 were at a standstill, not even letting people in because it was all cancelled.

If any airport can handle winter, it's O'Hare and it's new set of parallel runways. With four potential arrival runways, the airport can close one at a time to clear the snow and continue using the remaining runways with no restrictions. Before O'Hare got the two new parallel runways, they had only two arrival runways in bad visibility conditions and that would drop down to one runway when the other one had to be plowed.

Even with only two arrival runways open, the airport can still land around 70 arrivals per hour without restricting departing aircraft at all. If the forecast is flurries or little accumulation, the airport won't even have to breathe hard to accommodate normal traffic. If it's going to be -20 degrees, then there might be ramp issues but no airport delay problems.

The nice things about O'Hare being in de-icing conditions, the airport is exempt from any FAA-originated delay program for any other airport. If ATC has given all LGA traffic an hour delay, the ORD departures to LGA will not be effected as they don't want recently de-iced planes sitting in line on taxiways gathering snow/ice on the wings.

Midway would be worse for delays with snow accumulation as it only has two usable runways at the airport for larger planes. Midway's runways are also quite a bit shorter than O'Hare's and when you have snow and ice on the ground, the longer the runway, the better. google "southwest 1248"

Let's enlist the actively flying members who participate in the Chicago forum. I'll move this to that forum for more discussion. Ocn Vw 1K, Moderator, TravelBuzz.

Thanks, Gamecock. Looks like my flight is strictly a STL-ORD shuttle, at least from what I can find on FlightAware.

Thanks, PenaltyBox. That is really useful info.

Also, did not know that about WN1248. Wow.

You shouldn't have to worry; the amount of snow forecast for Thursday is nothing for O'Hare. I don't mean nothing as in zero snow, I mean nothing as in nothing significant from the standpoint of ORD (and Chicago and Chicagoans') operations.

(As to your backup plan, keep in mind, any weather that would seriously screw up or shut down ORD is going to seriously screw up or shut down MDW too, and probably before ORD. I would guess the same is true for Milwaukee.)

ORD is my home airport, and I've almost never in my life seen ORD operations seriously disrupted by a local weather event. A 10- or 20-year blizzard, maybe. But the snowstorm that is hitting the East Coast passed us by this time. And I imagine whatever delays that causes will clear out before Thursday.

As already mentioned, winter weather typically only affects ORD in terms of the domino effect of flight delays and cancellations at other airports (e.g., Boston, NY).

Ugh...booked on a CX F trip for tomorrow and I'm freaking out. Expected to be +8" of snow. This thread put me at ease a bit.

What time is your flight tomorrow? The later the better I'd imagine. The ripples from today will take a while to fix.

Note the post date, his tomorrow was unfortunately today. I would guess CX would be okay, some delay, but unlikely to be cancelled.

Did anything get out on Sunday? It was the fifth largest snowfall in Chicago history. I suspect there were at least some major delays, if not complete cancelations.

More directly on point to the OP's question, a little snow doesn't even slow things down at ORD. Extreme cold can shut it down (like last year's fuel freezing episodes), and feet of snow can be an issue, but an inch or two is SOP at ORD. The Summer is far worse when the thunder storms come through.

Agreed.

We know how to handle snow.

A mayor was defeated because he didn't back in 1979. No mayor makes that mistake any longer.

Ah, poor Mike Bilandic. When asked about why the city was taking so long to deal with one of the heaviest snowfalls in history, there are a lot of things a mayor could choose to say and have it not impact his political career. "What snow" is not one of them.

I have two separate tickets (I know, I know..) going from AUS-ORD (UA), and then connecting on separate ticket ORD-ARN with SK.

My flight from Austin is scheduled to land at 4.47 pm, and my onward flight with SK departs at 8.45 pm. Travelling on March 16. Is there reason to worry given all the recent shutdowns at O'Hare?