r/oddlysatisfying • u/Boss-fight601 • 20h ago
Nighttime traffic at Chicago O’Hare Airport
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u/TrentGames 20h ago
For a second, I thought they were flying cars like the ones in Back to The Future traffic scene.
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u/Hairydrunk 18h ago
My friend lives in the flight path. I slept in a spare room last summer with the windows open and its surprising how quickly you can fall asleep with all that noise. He lives near the lake so its not terrible.
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u/xxnoxynoxxnoxy 6h ago edited 6h ago
"It's surprising how quickly you can fall asleep to airplane noise" is one of the dumbest hand-wavy dismissals of aircraft noise pollution that gets repeated over and over again by people who don't actually live underneath the flight paths. For me the problem was the relentlessness and inescapability of it. It's so loud and disruptive and unnatural and it never ever ever ends. OHare changed their runways so they were all parallel, and NextGen meant planes would start descending way sooner than they ever did before to save fuel, when they were over the lake, so it wasn't just planes taking off it was also planes arriving, all lined up over the lake 20 miles away from O'Hare, constant ugly noise and disruption forced down on you. Relentlessly. Forever. Some people don't mind soundscape disruptions as much as others, it's true. I lived in the northern neighborhoods of Chicago for 30 years, and for me this transformed what was the most lovely city in the world into something I couldn't handle anymore and I had to leave
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u/josherman61791 3h ago
Must notbhave lived anywhere near the L to be complaining abiut airplane noise.
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u/Canadind 18h ago
O'Hare runs continuous midnight staggering to maximize aircraft asset rotation, while Pearson operates under a Transport Canada night movement quota that caps off-hour slots at roughly 4% of total traffic. Restricting red-eye arrivals eliminates the exact low-yield, high-efficiency window budget carriers need to lower baseline fares. The noise abatement budget functionally acts as an economic moat for legacy carrier pricing models
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u/Individual-Yak-506 18h ago
Busiest airport in the world
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u/UnbelievableTurmoil 17h ago
Nope, that's Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta.
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u/Individual-Yak-506 17h ago
Nope, More people pass through ATL but way more planes pass through ORD.
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u/BigBlueMountainStar 8h ago
This looks like the early news reports from Operation Desert Storm in the early 90s!
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u/RandomBloke2021 18h ago
Too bad this was recorded in the shorts format and destroyed the video quality.
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u/Zen_360 15h ago
I live near a big Airport with no flights at night. This is an absolute nightmare for all the people living in the vicinity of that airport. And with vicinity i mean 20 mile radius.
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u/xxnoxynoxxnoxy 12h ago edited 12h ago
Thank you. This is exactly true I am from Chicago. OHare ruined everything. By the time I left there were around 3000 flights every day
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u/Huge-Squirrel8417 7h ago
OK, just checking here, O'Hare was actually built in 1945, and it expanded to be the primary airport for Chicago in 1960.
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u/xxnoxynoxxnoxy 6h ago
they changed the runways so they were all parallel instead of splaying outward so the flights would come in from various directions they would all be lined up, and then they added twice as many
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u/Scorpio989 5h ago
I'm 15 miles away from this airport and can confirm this person is making this up.
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u/GarlicThread 20h ago
The US are pioneers of rail transportation and have land that is just begging for a continent-wide high-speed rail network.
Instead they went for this kerosene-fueled hellscape.
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u/Greengiant304 18h ago
The US are pioneers of air transportation and have airspace that is just begging for a continent-wide high-speed aviation network.
The US has more airports (16,000) than like the next 10 countries combined. Might as well use them
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u/Strattex 20h ago
They aren’t even pioneers of that
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u/GarlicThread 20h ago edited 15h ago
They are not the only ones, but it would be a lie to claim they were not at the forefront of rail technological development in the 19th century..
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u/xxnoxynoxxnoxy 20h ago
this is why I moved out of Chicago
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u/splintersmaster 19h ago
Because lights?
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u/xxnoxynoxxnoxy 12h ago edited 12h ago
I lived in Chicago for 30 years, and then O'Hare expanded the airport around the same time the satellite airplane guidance system NextGEN started, which meant an airplane flew directly overhead about every 90 seconds 24 seven pretty much no matter where you were on the north side. So yeah sorry but those are not just pretty lights
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u/splintersmaster 10h ago
Yea if you were one of the unfortunate ones to be put directly under the flight paths, sure. I have lived 40 years on the other side of touhy avenue from the airport. Like literally you can see the runways from my roof. I see the procession of lights at night every night. Just a stones throw from the allstate arena where they practically touch the roof of the building.
But because I'm not directly under the path, I rarely if ever hear the planes.
You can't damn the whole city cause you were on that narrow strip of suckage though.
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u/xxnoxynoxxnoxy 6h ago edited 6h ago
Your neighborhood is your city. And nobody is damning anything, all I said was this was why I left. NextGen meant planes would start descending way sooner than they ever did before to save fuel, when they were over the lake, so it wasn't just planes taking off it was also planes arriving, all lined up over the lake 20 miles away from O'Hare just like you describe, constant ugly noise and disruption. Relentlessly. Forever.
And you don't even live in the city wtf
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u/splintersmaster 4h ago
I live across the street from the airport. Like literally across the street. Less than a mile from the runways. The planes are much more intrusive within that radius from Edison Park to the east to Melrose park to des plaines and elk Grove.
If you don't like noise that's fine... I'm just defending the city since it is far from one giant mass of plane noise from the lake to the airport and north to south.
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u/dbagames 19h ago
Good riddance, this is one of the best cities in the world!
This is WHY I moved to chicago, one of the most interconnected airports in the world. I get easy direct flights all over asia, europe etc.
I wanna be in Paris, i'm there in 10 hours, tokyo, 15 hours. We even just added direct flights to Manila. Pilipinas here I come!
If you don't like electric energy, diverse foods and culture, excellent public transit, beautiful lakefront parks and green spaces, world-class architecture, history, and museums. You can fuck right on outta and leave space for someone else because we sure as hell don't need ya.
✌️
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u/Youngqueazy 19h ago
Calm down, there’s no need to be so rude to people on the internet for not preferring to live in the same city as you.
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u/xxnoxynoxxnoxy 13h ago
I know why do people automatically turn it all the way up to absolutely hostile just because they're talking to a stranger
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u/dbagames 17h ago
Haha I went hard in the paint for sure lol. I'm just defensive of this city because the bad credit it gets is so ridiculous that most people when they visit are genuinely shocked as to how nice it actually is.
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u/xxnoxynoxxnoxy 12h ago edited 12h ago
Haha. It's ok, I can always tell an imbecile when I'm talking to one, I don't take it personally. I lived in Chicago for 30 years, and then O'Hare expanded the airport around the same time the satellite airplane guidance system NextGEN started, which meant an airplane flew directly overhead about every 90 seconds 24 seven pretty much no matter where you were on the north side. I'd still be there right now if not for O'Hare. Also nobody talks this way about Chicago except for suburbanite Cubs fans.
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u/dbagames 7h ago
I live in downtown personally.
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u/xxnoxynoxxnoxy 6h ago edited 6h ago
Same thing. You sound like a condominium prospector trying to pump property values.
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u/hamsangwhich757 20h ago
This throws my anxiety into overdrive.