3 airports opening new runways amid economic woes

[Rockville]

Expansions expected to improve congestion in Chicago, D.C., Seattle

CHICAGO - Alarm in the aviation industry over a projected 10 percent drop in domestic flights this winter hasn't derailed plans to open multimillion-dollar runways at three U.S. airports Thursday.
Despite global economic woes that have fewer people taking to the skies, airport officials in all three cities are heralding the new capacity as crucial to alleviating congestion and delays, especially in the long term.
They say that's well worth the more than $450 million spent on the runway at Chicago's O'Hare International; the approximately $350 million spent at Dulles International, just outside of Washington, D.C.; and the more than $1 billion for Seattle-Tacoma International.
"This is absolutely critical, absolutely necessary, absolutely money well spent," said Rosemarie Andolino, who leads the ongoing $15 billion expansion of O'Hare, a vital global hub inaugurating its first new runway in nearly 40 years — even as several of O'Hare's major airlines buck the push to complete expansion.
Dulles' first new runway since the airport's 1962 opening got up and running Thursday morning when an American Airlines flight bound for Los Angeles took off, kicking up a small cloud of construction dust.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who planned to visit all three opening ceremonies Thursday, likened Dulles' runway to an early gift for holiday travelers seeking smoother operations.
But air traffic controllers note taxiways needed to make Dulles' new runway fully functional won't be complete until summer, meaning the runway's practical benefit will be minimal and dampened by long and confusing taxi routes to and from the strip.
"When they build all the taxiways, it will be a more useful piece of concrete," said Kieran Heflin, president of the Dulles tower chapter of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
Others call new runways and taxiways a positive step but note more needs to be done.
"The greater challenge will be to do something about modernizing air space so that those improvements in efficiency on the ground is matched in the air," said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, which represents U.S. carriers.
The association backs a Federal Aviation Administration push for a new satellite-based network that would let planes fly using GPS, instead of radar, though funding and implementation issues have hampered the $30 billion project.
Meanwhile, nationwide bottlenecks, particularly around chronically clogged New York City-area airports, will continue hampering delay-reduction efforts, Castelveter predicted.
The FAA acknowledges that new runways aren't the sole answer to solving delays, noting in a 2007 report that just two major U.S. airports have opened in the past 40 years — Dallas-Fort Worth and Denver International — and that as many as four need to be built in the next two to three decades.
Still, aviation officials are using the runway openings as a chance to celebrate in an otherwise bleak period for the air travel industry.
Runways typically take more than 10 years to plan, approve and build. Despite current downturns — data show domestic flights fell 6 percent in August — air travel is still expected to rise from the approximately 700 million air travelers in 2007 to more than 1 billion annually during the next decade.
O'Hare — with more than 900,000 takeoffs and landings a year, second only to Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International — is expected to handle an additional 300,000 flights annually by 2018, an increase the new runway should help to accommodate.
"You can't suddenly decide in 2018, `Oh shoot, we need more runways, let's hurry up and get them done next week,'" Andolino said.
Synonymous with air-travel angst for decades, O'Hare's delays persist despite a more than 8 percent fall in traffic this year. Mother Nature has been the airport's main vulnerability because when bad weather reduced visibility, controllers could land just two planes at a time — reducing capacity by a third.
The new strip allows controllers to bring in three planes at once no matter the conditions.
"The single biggest benefit is that it makes O'Hare a viable, all-weather airport," explained Joseph Schwieterman, a transportation expert at DePaul University. "We can put to rest the traffic meltdowns that came every few weeks whenever the skies turned dark."
Weather-induced disruptions also were a prime motivator behind Seattle-Tacoma's new landing strip.
"The third runway was not designed or conceived or justified for capacity," Mark Reis, managing director of the Port of Seattle's Aviation Division, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "It was justified on the bad-weather benefit."
Detractors have criticized the Seattle-Tacoma runway's billion-dollar price tag, which is five times initial estimates. Defenders say it will more than pay for itself in decades to come, including by reducing delays.
In Chicago, Andolino concedes that O'Hare delays won't be dramatically reduced until completion of the airport's entire multibillion-dollar expansion, which envisions another new runway and terminal by 2014.
But O'Hare hasn't secured funding for that second phase and six of the airport's carriers — long reluctant to financially commit — have told city and federal officials the ambitious expansion should be curbed in light of economic woes.
In statements sent this summer to Chicago and FAA officials and obtained by the Chicago Tribune, the airlines call continued expansion plans flawed. O'Hare's two biggest carriers, American and United, called efforts to move ahead with the project "premature and inappropriate."
A written response from the city to the FAA claimed the airlines let short-term financial concerns overshadow long-term gains.

The Associated Press updated 12:32 p.m. ET Nov. 20, 2008