An Inch Here...: fly away with me

i need to preface this entire post with the fact that i love airports! for all the time i spend in them, i should!

today i went on a field trip to o'hare airport with the student cmaa chapter from iit. cmaa is the construction management association of america. pb, a construction management firm, allowed us to tour the site and see all of the awesome things being done! we started off the a rundown of the entire project in their off-site office. they are building 6 new and/or lengthened runways for o'hare. and they are all parallel. this was weird for me because i know that most airports have the nw/se runway configuration in order to give them optimal runway usage in any wind or weather. this causes a slight lack of productivity because planes cannot take off and land at the same time. apparently, now planes don't rely on wind direction in order to take off so parallel runways are feasible. o'hare will still have a diagonal runway to use in extreme circumstances. in order to build these runways, the construction company has had to demo homes, move streams, reroute trains (twice), and will eventually move a cemetery. we were shown the new railway bridges (we didn't get out to take pictures), the new fedex sorting facility (with it's green roof), the new runway extension (from on the runway and from the top of a berm), and the new air traffic control tower (also from the bus).

the funnest part was probably the school bus transportation. on the way out there, it was fun to talk to all my friends about something other than class. and then the school bus that took us all around the site. i really didn't think it would make it. school buses aren't meant to be driven on dirt construction sites. most other people were enthralled by the planes taking off so close to us, but i travel so much and have been to god-knows-how-many air shows that the planes were the least interesting part to me. i am really happy i ended up taking my camera. make sure to check out my panorama pic set that includes an awesome shot of the skyline in the distance.