Should ease delays at ORD, SEA and IAD

The Federal Aviation Administration is celebrating the opening of new runways this month at three major U.S. airports – Chicago O’Hare, Seattle-Tacoma, and Washington Dulles. The added facilities should help to reduce flight delays and increase capacity, the agency noted. At O’Hare, the new runway – which should allow the airport to handle an extra 52,300 flight operations annually – is the second of three big improvement projects. The first was an extension of an existing runway, completed in September; the third will be another new runway, due to open in 2012. The newly opened runway is O’Hare’s first since 1971. At Seattle, the opening of the airport’s third runway “will greatly reduce flight delays by keeping airport operations efficient in all types of weather,” the FAA said. It noted that before the runway opened, arrivals at Sea-Tac were limited to one arrival stream when low clouds were present – which is about 44 percent of the time. With the third runway, the airport will be able to take two simultaneous staggered arrival streams in bad weather, “making as many as eight additional on-time arrivals per hour possible.” And at Washington Dulles, a fourth runway has opened – the first new runway since the airport opened in 1962. FAA said the runway will “potentially accommodate 100,000 additional annual aircraft operations and decrease the average delay per operation by 2.5 minutes.” The actual increased use will depend on demand, the agency noted. The new runway will let IAD move ahead on a reconstruction of its center runway in summer 2009 without increasing delays, the FAA said.