New England is one of the nation’s most miserably windy areas. Boston is far windier on average than Chicago, for example. The prevailing winds tend to be from the northwest. Logan Airport has parallel runways in every orientation except northwest. When the wind is really blowing from the northwest, therefore, flights start backing up at Logan, all forced to use Runway 33. More than 30 years ago, some bright administrator at Massport decided that building a 5000′ (short by jet standards) commuter airline runway 14/32 (oriented towards magnetic heading 320 in one direction, i.e., facing a northwest wind). This led to a big fight by neighborhood and environmental groups, a court injunction in 1976, a lifting of the injunction in 2003, and the runway opening last week (new airport diagram).
In the same amount of time that it took Los Angeles to add millions of jobs, India and China to grow their way out of abject poverty, and the microprocessor to grow from infancy to 3 billion instructions per second… we here in Boston managed to build one runway facing the wind…
[Logan was in the news about a month ago as well. Massport tried to prevent Continental from providing wireless Internet in its lounge, fearing that it would cut down on the number of people who fork over $8/day (down from $10) to Massport for the privilege of using Internet while trapped at Logan (and already paying substantial passenger fees to Massport rolled into their ticket price and Continental, of course, was paying high rent for the lounge space). The FCC rained on Massport’s parade, citing rules that prevent landlords from electronically imprisoning tenants.]
Seems like they’ve done a rather half-assed job at the new runway, though: according to the airport diagram, there’s no taxiway to the departure end of runway 32, just a pad to turn around on after back-taxiing. Maybe they intend intersection departures from where 32 meets 4L, but it still seems lazy…
I’ve never understood why wireless Internet is priced per day at Airports. It seems to me they’d get more business if they priced it around the typical layover — e.g. $1 for 3 hours of wireless access.
There won’t be any departures on Runway 32. The runway can only be used for arrivals on 32 and departures on 14. Per the judge’s order referenced in the posting, all arrivals and departures must be over the water(except in case of emergency, of course).
My buddy just moved here (Las Vegas) from Boston and he says “this is the only place I’ve seen worse than Boston when it comes to finishing construction projects”.
He was mainly speaking of how long it takes for the road construction, not buildings – they are mind-blowingly (not a word) fast.