Hi All - In 20 years of living in the Chicago area, including the last 3 years of driving past O’Hare twice a day, I’ve never seen what I saw tonight: at least 2 planes landing on 22L. They looked quite out of place! I was listening to ATC for a few minutes, but I didn’t hear any activity related to landing on 22L. I think they were also taking off on 22L, which is quite common. What gives? Thanks,
Peter
Could’ve been a situation of strong southwest winds and 22R not being able to handle all the arrivals at the time. 22L actually has high speed exit taxiways and the taxi time to the terminal is probably shorter than 27R/9L.
Also, when there’s a contaminated runway or reports of turbulence on the 22R approach, they can’t do LAHSO 22R landings and also run approaches on 27L. Before 27R this basically put ORD in a single runway arrival operation (with the option to run both arrivals and departures on the runway now called 28).
However, with the ongoing construction of 10R/28L, 10/28 may have been unavailable, which may be the reason you saw arrivals on 22L.