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Originally Posted by tennreb
I'm suprised ATL only has four runways. Memphis has four runways. DFW has seven! No wonder ATL is infamous for endless waits on the tarmac.
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It's not surprising that Memphis has 4 runways since it is the busiest cargo airport in the world. DFW has the advantage of being the second largest airport in the U.S. in terms of land area (only Denver is larger, and both were constructed from the ground up in the last 32 years--DFW in 1974 and DIA in 1994 whereas ATL is an expansion of the city's original airport property that opened in 1926), so it has been easy for them to build 7 runways because the airport's land area is larger than that of the island of Manhattan. Chicago's O'Hare (ORD) has 6 runways, and since it opened in 1955, it was built on larger parcel of land than the older Hartsfield-Jackson site and, therefore, has also had an easier time building additional runways. ATL is closely surrounded by 3 interstate highways (I-85, I-285, and I-75), so in order to build a much needed fifth runway, it had to built over I-285 which obviously is not an easy task. However, unlike DFW, ORD, and MEM,
ALL of ATL's runways are parallel, including the new fifth runway which will soon be completed. Yes, DFW has 5 parallel runways but also has 2 diagonal runways. ORD has diagonal runways running in 3 different directions--no more than 2 parallel runways in any given direction. MEM has 3 parallel north-south runways and one perpendicular east-west runway. Why does ATL have the advantage over the rest? Because with ALL of it's runways being parallel, there is no crossing of flight paths, so planes can take off and land simultaneously on all four (soon to be five) runways continuously without having to wait for any planes to take off or land on a non-parallel runway that would cross their flightpath.
Here are satellite views (same scale) of ATL (before construction of the 5th runway to the south of the other runways), DFW, and ORD for comparison:
ATL
DFW
ORD
And speaking of the new fifth runway, I found these two aerial views at airliners.net:
