Airline Pilot Central Forums - NTSB: Southwest Plane at Midway Needed More Runway

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boeingguy

The investigation has revealed that runway 31C was used as the landing runway because it contained lower landing minimums for aircraft using the ILS approach. If runway 13C was used, the runway most aligned with the wind, pilots would have been unable to land because of insufficient landing minimums.

That might be what they are saying, but, I think the ‘real’ reason 31C was being used is that ORD TRACON rules the roost up there and a change of runways at MDW, to favor winds, would have caused MAJOR disruption of their traffic. I think there is a ‘little brother’ culture up there and MDW gets hind tit.

Perhaps the SWAL crew was lulled into submission by the numbers their computer spit out. The very least a Captain should have done was to request a different runway, because the little hairs on the back of his neck were standing at attention. If you ARE going to ‘go with the flow’ under those ‘iffy’ circumstances. .you BETTER NOT land it with only 4500’ remaining.

Hindsight is wonderful, but I think many of us would have had the Sexual Advisor sitting to our right tell Approach that if we could not be assigned a runway with more favorable wind, we were changing destination to ORD, due to conditions.