By contrast, Dulles International Airport, with an average of 922 daily flights, can use three runways at the same time and has a fourth at an angle for use when conditions allow. Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, with about 700 commercial flights on an average day, normally uses two runways, with a third reserved mostly for smaller planes.
There are a number of reasons that a pilot on final approach to land might be ordered to abort the attempt. Sometimes a plane may be approaching too fast or too high for safety. Other times the weather plays a factor.
FAA records for August 2010, for example, show at least seven instances in which planes on final approach to National were ordered to go around “due to traffic on the runway,” the same gut-wrenching experience Cooley and Gutner had this month.
That traffic on the runway could be there for a couple of reasons: A plane that just landed hasn’t moved out of the way quickly enough or, more likely, a plane cleared for takeoff has dawdled on the runway past the time when the controller expected it to be gone.
A third possibility: The arriving plane approached more quickly than anticipated, throwing off the tower’s timing.
Dulles has about as many go-arounds as National, according to one veteran controller who keeps track of such incidents.
The controller, who asked not be named because he’s not authorized to speak for the FAA, said that’s because Dulles often uses the same runway to handle both arrivals and departures. BWI usually uses one runway for arriving flights and a second for departures. In October, National recorded 39 go-arounds, Dulles had 20 and BWI had 3, according to an internal FAA document.
The controller said that although the plane on the runway and the plane that gets waved off from landing may merge into a single blip on the radar screen, “from the tower they don’t look that close.”
“Sometimes they look close, but the alternative would be a lot worse,” he said. “They’d be smashed up on the runway.”
Cooley said her husband saw her plane shoot back skyward from the terminal waiting area, where a gasp rippled through the crowd.
“We were back in the air for another 10 minutes,” she said. “Finally, the flight attendant came and said there had been another plane on the runway. I was so nervous. I just wanted to get my feet on the ground.”
Loading...
Comments