State lawmaker opposes longer runway at Chicago Executive Airport

I didn't realize CGX was reopened.
 
Palwaukee. At least it's better than Washington Executive.
 
Short sightedness abounds... airports are rarely about local communities. They’re usually about access to and commerce within the larger region they serve.

Edit: Basically, if you live near the airport.. tough noogies! It’s not about you!
 
I am very familiar with KPWK as I did most of my primary training there. Business is booming and one of the major FBOs at the airport is expanding like there is no tomorrow.

The main runway (16/34) is 5000'x150. There are two more runways (12/30) and (6/24). Runway 24 is funny: nominally a 3700' runway, has a displaced threshold more than 1000'. One of the local schools there forbids students and renters from landing on 24 because its final is over a densely forested area.

There are no immediate plans, however, to extend the main runway. The airport leadership did a roadmap study for the future of the airport last year. You can't talk future without talking expansion. On the positive side of things, there is talk about reopening a diner at the airport -- though no suitable space is available currently.

Without some serious eminent domain'g, there is very little room to extend runway 16/34. Would adding 300' more to a 5000' runway make that big of a difference? Anything beyond that would require eminent domain procedures over private properties north and south of the field.
 
EdFred said:
Do they also prohibit students from flying on cross countries anywhere except over cornfields?
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Oh, it gets better. They also forbid taking off from 6, because the departure leg is over the same densely forested area. I wonder what their policies would have been if they were operating out of CGX -- because they have a "no flight over water" restriction, as well.

Though seriously, I can see how a student may be surprised by any updraft difference as they cross from the forest to the open space. But this is something that you teach/learn, and you get on with, right? Landing on 24 helped me improve my short field technique.
 
rk911 said:
State lawmaker opposes longer runway
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I didn't read the article but I wonder if this is how it works.
Person who buys home next to an airport which has been there for 50 years complains to 'Lawmaker' about airport.
Lawmaker who is, these days, only interested in votes (which is now measured by how they respond to complaints) takes a stance or even action against said longstanding airport.

Lawmakers no longer consider all effects of such a change; they don't take into account the effect on businesses/users/other airport stakeholders, or the direction a community is going - they just want to be seen by their voting public as responding to all complaints.

It's the best way to ensure re-election - which is the only goal.
 
EdFred said:
I didn't realize CGX was reopened.
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Considering Daley bulldozed CGX Meigs Field in the middle of the night, any talk of reopening CGX would be a "runway extension."

Sad to see Chicago continue to be so anti-aviation but they're not the only ones... I still want to weep at the remains of Willow Grove NAS in Pennsylvania every time I drive by it... It still has all of it's precision approach lighting fixtures in place while the PA Air National Guard and Navy does environmental remediation but the city has already decided the land will be repurposed instead of reopening the airport so its just a matter of time until the lights come down and the runways permanently bulldozed.

The 2 other local airports near me have noise abatement procedures that will be obsolete in a few months as developers are already clearing land to build housing developments directly under the noise abatement areas. Will be interesting to see what happens when people start moving into those houses.
 
apr911 said:
Sad to see Chicago continue to be so anti-aviation but they're not the only ones...
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I wouldn't characterize Chicago as anti-aviation. The city operates two major airports. In addition, we have 4 Class-D airports in the metropolitan area, which also includes dozens of non-towered fields. There is a major aviation program at one of our universities. Boeing and United are based here.

It is true that a past mayor shut down a regional airport with questionable (to put it mildly) tactics. But if a city's sentiment toward aviation is measured by mayoral destruction or construction of runways, I think O'Hare' expansion makes up for Meigg's shutdown.

The city thrives on aviation and is aware of that. That's why the city expanded O'Hare and continues to do so. But we run into problems: the rest of the city's infrastructure is no match for the expanded airports. The subway system is old and slow. The highways to both airports are congested. We cannot continue like this because who would want to fly to a jazzy airport with 10 runways and 7 terminals and then spend 1.5 hours in a taxi for the 18 miles to downtown Chicago?

Is Chicago anti-aviation because some legislator overreacted to a paper-study about the expansion of a land-locked regional airport? I don't think so. Chicago loves aviation, CGX's demise notwithstanding.
 
Point taken. Most places seem to have similar love/hate relationships with general aviation. I look again to Willow Grove, PA or Solberg in Branchburg, NJ and their decade long fight with the state of NJ against imminent domain that was declared over a similar freak out over a long-term airport plan that talked about extending the runway or the troubles and opposition faced by Santa Monica airport.
 
GreatLakesFlying said:
Is Chicago anti-aviation because some legislator overreacted to a paper-study about the expansion of a land-locked regional airport? I don't think so. Chicago loves aviation, CGX's demise notwithstanding.
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Chicago has two airports, neither of which is a GA airport. Chicago bulldozed its only GA airport in the middle of the night on the order of a self-serving and fear mongering mayor who said the iconic airfield could be used to launch terrorist attacks. That same mayor subsequently pushed to have a permanent flight restriction imposed on general aviation around downtown Chicago. The mayor and the city of Chicago demonized general aviation pilots for many years, ripping us in the press.

Don't confuse the suburban airports with the city of Chicago. The suburbs have several GA friendly airports, and the suburbs that support those airports generally recognize the benefits of GA. The suburbs are not Chicago. Chicago does not "love" aviation. Chicago merely benefits from and supports air carrier service. If it "loved" aviation, Meigs would still be operational and Mayor Daley would have been voted out or impeached after CGX closed.
 
And at the real ChicaGo EXecutive there was no houses to take off or land over, and patterns would have been over the water reducing/eliminating the noise complaints from home owners.
 
To circle back to the original topic of this thread... I grew up under the base leg for runway 34. As a little kid, I used to love watching airplanes fly over my house at 500'. My parents still live in the same house.

The airport boundary used to be smaller, with Wolf and Hintz roads squared off. Both roads were moved and houses were torn down to expand the airport boundary (I think back in the 1990's). It was a major project.

In the early 1980's, I took piano lessons in a house on Wolf Rd, just south of Hintz near the departure end of 16. Back then, the old jets were so loud that it would rattle the windows of my piano teacher's house, and you couldn't hear the person next to you screaming when the jets would take off. We got used to it, jet taking off meant you'd just stop and wait for a minute.

Jets have come a long way since then, and so has the airport. Noise from jets is not an issue, even for people living close to the airport. With quiet jets now, residents near the airport are not impacted to the same degree as they were in the 1980's. My piano teacher's house was torn down to make way for the airport expansion, and it is now the approximate location of Atlantic Aviation. Many of the houses at the airport boundary across Wolf were tucked into a neigborhood 30 years ago before the road was relocted. They did good to expand the airport and create a buffer zone, but it did displace some long term residents with many houses torn down and neighborhoods changed.

The issue I see is that the airport is still seriously land locked and always has been. Any *meaningful* expansion of the runway has the potential to displace roads, homes, and businesses. Minor runway extensions aren't likely to have the intended result of attracting bigger faster jets. Waukegan to the north already has a 6000' runway, and DuPage has a 7500' runway. They can't add 1000' without tearing something up.
 
Thunderbird83 said:
Chicago has two airports, neither of which is a GA airport. Chicago bulldozed its only GA airport in the middle of the night on the order of a self-serving and fear mongering mayor who said the iconic airfield could be used to launch terrorist attacks. That same mayor subsequently pushed to have a permanent flight restriction imposed on general aviation around downtown Chicago. The mayor and the city of Chicago demonized general aviation pilots for many years, ripping us in the press.

Don't confuse the suburban airports with the city of Chicago. The suburbs have several GA friendly airports, and the suburbs that support those airports generally recognize the benefits of GA. The suburbs are not Chicago. Chicago does not "love" aviation. Chicago merely benefits from and supports air carrier service. If it "loved" aviation, Meigs would still be operational and Mayor Daley would have been voted out or impeached after CGX closed.
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Sadly, Chicago only hates little planes. They welcomed Boeing's world HQ a few years ago.
 
I've not set foot in Chicago since they chopped up Meigs.

Sent from my SM-G960U1 using Tapatalk
 
Thunderbird83 said:
Chicago has two airports, neither of which is a GA airport.
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It is true that neither Midway nor O'Hare are exclusively GA, but they do serve GA traffic. My argument, however, was whether Chicago loves aviation; not GA exclusively. I wrote that argument because a suburban legislator's objections the expansion of a suburban airport where assumed to reflect the city's sentiments towards aviation.
 
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