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Jim K

Jim K

Final Approach
PoA Supporter
Joined
Mar 31, 2019
Messages
5,981
Location
CMI
Display Name
Display name:
Richard Digits
I've been working towards the goal of landing at every public airport in IL. Decided that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to visit O'Hare day VFR. Everything went smoothly, approach and tower were easy to deal with, taxiing to the departure runway was by far the hardest part.... those ground controllers don't give you any slack. Took my 11YO along to take pictures, so very few of them came out lol. Hopefully she's old enough to remember and someday appreciate it.

Got flight following on the ground at home, had to repeat o'hare twice.... first Chicago approach controller asked again...you want to LAND at ohare? Affirmative. They took me along the lake shore and gave me 27L. Thankfully I had looked up the ILS ahead of time, as I never would've gotten to the correct runway without it. Had to make a 360 to let a CRJ in ahead of me, and by luck was circling Wrigley. Asked for a taxi back, but they required me to go pay at signature. $178, assuming you stay less than an hour.

Got flight following back home from metering. A few comments, giggles, and waves from the heavy iron...taxied all the way to 28R and got my first "line up and wait"

Absolutely 100% worth the time & money. Landing on the runway is just like anywhere else, but the experience of talking to ground (or rather, listening), and winding around the terminal with jets everywhere was something special.

Screenshot_20200414-142923_Chrome.jpg IMG_20200414_091154092.jpg IMG_20200414_091435736.jpg IMG_20200414_092414596.jpg IMG_20200414_094441443.jpg
 
congrats big airports big fees. hope you took the co pilot for van ice cream.
 
Nice!

Jim K said:
$178, assuming you stay less than an hour.
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Without fuel or any other services? Wow, that's gone up since I was last there!
I paid $87 for landing, parking, and "infrastructure fee" a couple of years ago, though I also bought a little fuel back then.

- Martin
 
Martin Pauly said:
Nice!


Without fuel or any other services? Wow, that's gone up since I was last there!
I paid $87 for landing, parking, and "infrastructure fee" a couple of years ago, though I also bought a little fuel back then.

- Martin
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Yeah...I understand the city raised the prices some time in the last year or two. $129 landing fee & $129 parking fee if there >1hr. Signature gets $49 handling, waived with fuel purchase @ $8.79/gal. Passed on that, although it probably would've saved me a few dollars as it's still $5/gal at home.

JOhnH said:
Those pictures are as good as the ones I take.

I agree with @PPC1052 . You need to save that picture for the rest of both of your lives.
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Full disclosure....I took the first two and Signature line crew took the last one.....I should've made it clear to her that zooming in on things with a cell phone doesn't work great. Oh well....I don't think I'll ever forget winding around on taxiway alpha, looking for alpha 15. Plus, it's way more fun to share these experiences.

I agree that the last one is a treasure.
 
Awesome! Haven't done ORD yet but I've done MDW in a PA46 and PC12. Probably the most challenging single pilot airport I've been to purely because of the ground ops. Glad you two were able to experience that.
 
Nice. If your gonna do GA into ORD nows the time to do it. Its dead and the controllers dont have too much going on on the ground. I landed 28c and got cross 28r at tango taxi to the ramp. We've actually started firing up both engines on pushback cause we can't get 1 warm if we start it on taxi out :D
 
Awesome! What a great experience!
 
I still remember when the taxiways had names vs. alpha/numeric identifiers, and used the "Stub" as my geo-reference.
 
Way to go!!! This is so cool that you had your daughter along :) Love the skyline view!!!

From what I am reading, past research and a recent landing at a Bravo it seems that landing fees have pretty much doubled in less than 1yr.
 
Awesome...landed at Midway way back in 90 in a 182 on the way back from OSH with my dad...great experience. Shot an ILS and 5old to keep speed up for airliner behind and caution wake turbulence from departing airliner ahead. As others have said, great memory for you and your daughter!
 
I didn’t think they could force you to taxi to the FBO to pay at a public airport. I’ve always done full stop taxi back at larger airports. Guess I’ve been lucky with ATC so far. :cool:
 
Daytonabch04 said:
I didn’t think they could force you to taxi to the FBO to pay at a public airport. I’ve always done full stop taxi back at larger airports. Guess I’ve been lucky with ATC so far. :cool:
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I watched a video from Saturday, I believe, where a guy in an RV was offered a taxi back or a stop & go, but requested a low approach. I've also seen several taxi back videos at night. The only thing I can figure is they have different requirements during weekdays. I'm honestly glad they did though, in spite of the cost, as a TNG or taxi back would've missed out on the most memorable parts.
 
Daytonabch04 said:
I didn’t think they could force you to taxi to the FBO to pay at a public airport. I’ve always done full stop taxi back at larger airports. Guess I’ve been lucky with ATC so far. :cool:
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It's not uncommon at the largest, busiest, hub Class B airports. It help discourage GA traffic that severely interferes with the already congested airline traffic. There is usually a note in the A/FD or Chart Supplement that's says no touch and goes, all flights must terminate at the FBO, etc.
 
Now is the time to get your ORD landing. For $178 I think I would settle for a flyby though.

Great adventure it looks.
 
At $178, I really hope you went in and got a few cookies.

Congrats. Class-Bs are a lot like class-Cs, everything is just a little bigger and you have to be more on your game.
 
“approach and tower were easy to deal with”

Surely you can’t be talking about the Chicago Approach who never lets anyone into the Bravo :D:D
 
Minimum landing fee at SFO is $232 last time I checked. That’s just the landing fee, Signature has their own fees on top of that.
 
Jmcmanna said:
“approach and tower were easy to deal with”

Surely you can’t be talking about the Chicago Approach who never lets anyone into the Bravo :D:D
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They've gotten markedly better over the last 20 years... But rumors will persist forever!

I've still only gotten into the Chicago Bravo 3 times in 17 years of flying in and through the area... But at least C90 will talk to you now as you're flying around the Bravo!
 
Just last week I cleared a Cirrus over GYY through the Bravo at 8500 direct to BUU. I thought it would be all over POA by now :cool::D
 
I was looking through our photos again, and discovered that one of them was actually a video. It's not high quality, and the sound was horrific so I muted it, but I went ahead and uploaded it to YouTube in case anyone is curious. It starts when we cross the bridge and ends a bit after takeoff.

At 2:12 we pass an American 737. Ground had told them "you'll be following an archer". The pilot couldn't contain her giggling when she read it back, which pretty much made my day.

We takeoff around 5:50, which has some neat views. I was excited to see a couple 747 cargo planes at the freight terminal, which I didn't get to see when we did it.

The video is in portrait mode, so I apologize about that. I take full responsibility for failing to teach her to properly run a cell phone camera lol.

 
Jmcmanna said:
“approach and tower were easy to deal with”

Surely you can’t be talking about the Chicago Approach who never lets anyone into the Bravo :D:D
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I have a 100% acceptance rate at this point :p
 
Well, you've inspired me. I read this thread a few weeks ago and thought I have to do the same thing and today I finally got a chance. Tower even offered to let me do a touch and go, which I would have preferred but the camera I put on the wing was unresponsive so I wanted to make sure it was rolling for my departure if it missed the whole approach and landing (which it did). As a consolation prize, I got to follow a Kalitta 747 to the runway, which was pretty neat. $179.04 later I'm back home, but it was worth every cent!IMG_1923.jpg Kalitta_747.png
 
Very nice, good pics, your daughter did a great job... I spent the night in Seattle and flew into Sea Tac an overnight stay cost me $35. That was back in 1996..:rolleyes:
 
So I’m curious on this. Did you have to contact Chicago O Hare Clearance Delivery before leaving the FBO? This is to request a VFR clearance to your destination. Or did you just simply contact ground control? @Jim K
 
dtbecker said:
So I’m curious on this. Did you have to contact Chicago O Hare Clearance Delivery before leaving the FBO? This is to request a VFR clearance to your destination. Or did you just simply contact ground control? @Jim K
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At O'Hare, you contact Clearance Delivery, then Ground Metering, then you MONITOR Ground.
 
dtbecker said:
So I’m curious on this. Did you have to contact Chicago O Hare Clearance Delivery before leaving the FBO? This is to request a VFR clearance to your destination. Or did you just simply contact ground control? @Jim K
Click to expand...

So ohare has a "metering" frequency, which as i understand it basically coordinates departures to be the most efficient. They are the first point of contact before leaving the ramp. I told him what i wanted,and he gave me my initial taxi instruction,a ground control freq to monitor,and said they would have a clearance for me by the time i got to the runway. I don't remember now who gave me a squawk code,but i think it was one of the ground controllers.

I got a little lucky as i didn't know what frequency to call to request my departure. Listening for a minute to the last ground freq i was on, I heard someone else make a request,and be told tersly to "contact monitoring". My efb of course had the frequency,so i dodged a butt chewing there. On the way off the ramp, I saw that there is a sign to that effect, but that's about 1/4 mile from where i was parked.

There is yet another 'clearance delivery' frequency but i don't know if you'd talk to them before or after metering if you're ifr. I'm sure someone here like @Martin Pauly could address that.
 
The requirement to contact Metering is on the ATIS.

"WHEN READY TO TAXI CONTACT GND METERING ON FREQ 121.67"

The controller in the Metering position verifies your location and that you have the current ATIS then puts you in the "Queue" for the Ground controller working outbound ground (121.75). He's (normally) so busy that there's no time for people to call him. He calls you when he's ready to move you. At busy times it's very common for him to issue taxi instructions to 5 to 10 different aircraft without ever unkeying his mic. Several times I've taxiied out and departed at ORD without making a single transmission on the outbound Ground frequency.
 
As @Larry in TN described, the order in which this is supposed to happen is
  1. You call Clearance Delivery for your VFR or IFR departure clearance
  2. When ready to taxi, you call Metering - they will work you into the grand plan for all aircraft taxiing for departure
  3. At some point, Metering will tell you to monitor Ground, at which point you switch to the Ground frequency
Metering pre-sorts the outbound aircraft for the Ground controller to optimize departures, e.g. sequencing them such that their first turns after take-off alternated between left and right, to achieve required separation while keeping the number of departures high. Not really applicable to light GA, but that's why these large airports have Metering.

- Martin
 
Martin Pauly said:
As @Larry in TN described, the order in which this is supposed to happen is
  1. You call Clearance Delivery for your VFR or IFR departure clearance
  2. When ready to taxi, you call Metering - they will work you into the grand plan for all aircraft taxiing for departure
  3. At some point, Metering will tell you to monitor Ground, at which point you switch to the Ground frequency
Metering pre-sorts the outbound aircraft for the Ground controller to optimize departures, e.g. sequencing them such that their first turns after take-off alternated between left and right, to achieve required separation while keeping the number of departures high. Not really applicable to light GA, but that's why these large airports have Metering.

- Martin
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That is really interesting about Ground Metering. It is the first time I've heard of that.

On a completely unrelated note, is it possible to bypass Chicago Approach and go straight to Chicago Tower when landing? Essentially, fly under the busy Bravo airspace and fly near the Class Bravo surface airspace then call up Chicago Tower to land.
 
Please tell me that when taxing to park a guy came out with the light wands and gave you hand signals - and saluted!

I'm guessing "no" on the baggage train and the food service catering truck coming out to meet you......
 
dtbecker said:
On a completely unrelated note, is it possible to bypass Chicago Approach and go straight to Chicago Tower when landing? Essentially, fly under the busy Bravo airspace and fly near the Class Bravo surface airspace then call up Chicago Tower to land.
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From what I’ve gathered on my own trip into a Bravo, they won’t allow you to land unless you talk to approach. Approach is who will coordinate your arrival with other arrival traffic and tell you what runway to expect before you call tower. Towers don’t want cold calls for approaches from random aircraft that haven’t already been in contact with an approach facility.
 
Seems now is the time to get in all the Bravo flying you want. A video popped up on my youtube feed the other day of a GA pilot pulling off low approaches at the NYC 3 (EWR, LGA, JFK) in one flight, in succession. I'm going to have to go out and get into KTPA and KMCO... Maybe even mosey on down to KMIA

I landed at my first (and thus far only) Bravo airport, KPHL, just about a year ago now (June 5) and pre-COVID. It's definitely one of my cooler aviation memories. I know people on here have questioned it but it still seems like it'd be kind of a cool goal to log a landing at each of the Bravos (or at least most of them since KADW and KNKX are military and KDCA doesn't really permit GA). I'd probably feel differently if I were or intended to fly professionally, then it would be "just another airport" to me but even though I have my commercial/cfi/i, flying is more hobby than career and how many non-airline pilots can say they've landed at all the Bravos? For that matter, how many airline pilots can say the same?
 
dtbecker said:
That is really interesting about Ground Metering. It is the first time I've heard of that.
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Houston (KIAH) uses metering as well. Denver (KDEN) does but it's a ramp control function, not an ATC function. Newark (KEWR) will use one when aiport congestion and route delays require it. I'm sure there are more.

On a completely unrelated note, is it possible to bypass Chicago Approach and go straight to Chicago Tower when landing?
Click to expand...
They'll tell you is to contact Approach.
 
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