Officials Say The State Can't Wait Until Late 2008

The state of Illinois says it must have a backup airport surveillance radar for O'Hare sooner that the FAA's planned 2008 delivery date. State officials are in a lather to avoid a repeat of the radar outage at the Chicago hub earlier this month that caused a bit of an aerial traffic jam.

According to the Chicago Tribune, members of the state's congressional delegation sent FAA administrator Marion Blakey a letter asking her to speed delivery of a backup system scheduled for installation in late 2008.

The letter stated in part, "It is astounding that Atlanta and Dallas-Ft. Worth have multiple radars to cover for catastrophic failures on site, but FAA does not believe O'Hare should be given similar consideration."

On December 15 a faulty switch took O'Hare's ASR-9 radar down for a number of hours in the early morning. Another radar that primarily serves Midway provided some coverage, but its limited view to the north forced controllers to reduce the number of planes going in and out of O'Hare.

The FAA plans to install a backup radar at O'Hare when the first runway under the airport's $15 billion expansion project is commissioned in late 2008.

According to city officials, though, the project is behind schedule and there's no telling when the runway will open.

The state's letter to the FAA also said, "Without sufficient technology investments, O'Hare will continue to experience delays and congestion, having far-reaching effects on our entire system."

According to the Tribune, the FAA isn't biting. FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Cory told the paper, "We are evaluating the request. At this time the FAA has no plans to move from what we are doing at O'Hare in terms of coordinating installation of the new equipment with the construction on the airfield."

Maybe Mayor Daley can get a few more bulldozers over there and speed that expansion project up a bit...

FMI: www.faa.gov