Ed Brill

Chicago Tribune: Outrage flies at Midway

August 5 2003

Two interesting quotes from the Chicago Tribune recently: Article one: Outrage flies at Midway, August 5, 2003: (emphasis mine)

Federal officials even blocked the stairs and turned off escalators from the upper-level ticket counter to slow the influx of passengers into the line that crossed the lone pedestrian bridge leading from the terminal to the gates. ...The city plans to add an 11th metal detector lane by the end of the week, but officials said last week a more permanent fix--adding two more passenger bridges--is at least two years away.

Single point of failure = bad. This one is really doubly bad design. There is only one access point to the terminals (so thus, one bottleneck) and it is a bridge, meaning that it is vulnerable and were something to happen to this pedestrian bridge, the airport would shut down. Hello???? This is why disaster recovery planning is so important. You have to anticipate the unexpected, and plan for the worst case. See, Jim Harris, I did learn something at US Robotics. :) I also learned never to fly out of Midway....
Article two: Fliers petition to re-open Meigs, August 4. 2003:

Meanwhile, the computer-gaming industry has reacted to the Meigs shutdown. Microsoft, which last week released its "Flight Simulator 2004--A Century of Flight" software, has eliminated Meigs as the airport that is automatically displayed when the program opens. Meigs had been the default airport for the last 20 years.
"Because of the Meigs situation, we switched to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport," said Ken Lavering, a Microsoft program manager.
Meigs is still among the 23,760 airports contained in the software program but may be dropped in the 2005 version.

Changing the default airport -- These Microsoft guys will stop at nothing to get under my skin!
What's more interesting to me though is that number -- are there really almost 24,000 airports in the world? That can't be right. I mean, airports are designated by a three letter code. That means that there are only 17,576 possible combinations for airport designations. I think I've seen a few airports referred to with four letters...maybe that's their world's version of IPv6?

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category: Add/View Comments [8]

Post a Comment

1 Carl http://www.instant-tech.com | 8/5/2003 9:45:33 PM
You are thinking of just major airports, MS flight simulator also includes the grass strips that exist, military fields etc. So their number is probably correct, although in the world I think there are more than 36000 airports, so they've still missed a few.

2 Jan Van Puyvelde | 8/6/2003 3:22:47 AM
According to this article (http://www.skygod.com/asstd/abc.html) all 26 letters can be used. Is this wrong and is one letter not allowed ?

3 Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 8/6/2003 3:23:01 AM
no, you're right -- my mistake, I simply cubed 25 instead of 26.

To Carl's point, I found this site which lists paved runways worldwide (as of 2001). It looks like there are somewhere around 11,500 or so (I didn't add up all the numbers, stopped when I got to some of the smaller countries). Some of the numbers are surprising, that Cuba would have more than Chile, or Bulgaria be so high in the ranking. China's number seems really low, too. Very intriguing.

4 Tony C http://www.tonycocks.com | 8/6/2003 4:55:23 AM
...you can simulate final approach to O'Hare in the Wright Flyer with a 20mph cross wind and engine failure?

5 John Haywood | 8/6/2003 6:32:53 AM
Ah you're thinking of the IATA three-letter codes which are allocated to major airports (all with scheduled services plus certain others) by the Internation Association of Travel Agents for booking tickets, etc.

Within the aviation industry, the four letter ICAO codes are used(example EGLL for London Heathrow as opposed to LHR), these have a region and country component and all but the smallest airstrips have them allocated.