Aug. 26--New restrictions on Charlotte Douglas International Airport's diagonal runway have slowed the hourly arrival rate at the airport and drawn complaints from area residents about noise from new flight patterns.
Airport officials will discuss the new runway restrictions, implemented last month by the Federal Aviation Administration, at Charlotte City Council's 5 p.m. dinner meeting Monday.
The FAA said last month that Charlotte Douglas can no longer use the airport's diagonal runway during the airport's operating hours, except for emergencies. In practice, that means the airport can generally only use its three parallel runways for planes that are landing and departing.
Interim aviation director Brent Cagle and assistant aviation director Jack Christine will brief City Council on the situation Monday, according to the meeting agenda.
Aviation officials also expect to move forward in the next four months with design work and environmental impact studies for a planned fourth parallel runway.
Officials said the changes have cut the hourly arrival rate for flights at Charlotte Douglas airport from 96 flights to 85. US Airways, the airport's main carrier, is studying the effects of the restriction.
In a message sent to US Airways pilots earlier this month, one of the company's flight operations managers warned that the new restrictions "will put a strain on the arrival rate" and could cause delays.
The restrictions have also re-routed planes over more densely-populated areas around the airport at night, when the airport's diagonal runway was used for noise abatement.
Irv Gleaner lives near Brawley School Road in Mooresville, on a peninsula in Lake Norman. After 35 years living under the approach path to Philadelphia International Airport, he said he researched flight paths around Charlotte Douglas to avoid moving under any when he relocated last year.
"I said I'd had enough of this," he said of the noise from Philadelphia International, where he was about 10 miles from the runway. "I said I never want to move in a noisy area again," said Gleaner. His house now is about 23 miles north of Charlotte Douglas.
"All of a sudden we go from no planes at all to all this traffic," said Gleaner. He said the noise from planes coming in over his house at night and in the early morning is audible even with the windows closed. "It's a shame."
The FAA instituted the change to temporarily ban "converging operations" at diagonal runways nationwide last month.
"Due to operational concerns with converging flight paths at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, the FAA has decided to temporarily suspend the operation until we can conduct a full review," said FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen, in a statement.
Federal records show there have been a handful of incidents caused by the runway configuration at Charlotte Douglas over the past few years.
In October, an Embraer 170 regional jet departed from the diagonal runway while a Boeing 767 approached for a landing on the center runway. An automated computer system didn't sound an alarm, because the runways don't intersect.
An FAA report showed the jets came within 4,600 feet of each other, or less than a mile. An air traffic controller in the tower filed an anonymous complaint with the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a database maintained by NASA.
"I would recommend that we do away with this configuration," the controller wrote of the runway setup. "We are oversaturated with airplanes during this time...It is very complex to land and depart (on the diagonal runway) while also trying to 'shoot a gap' with Runway 18C arrivals."
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