MINNEAPOLIS — If you think road construction season is maddening in Minnesota right now, chances are you haven't been stuck in runway construction at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Two of the four runways at the airport closed down in June for a reconstruction project that isn't slated to finish until Sept. 21.
"This is not minor maintenance," said Jeff Lea, spokesperson for the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which broke ground this summer on the first major runway reconstruction project in 15 years. "There are multiple projects rolled into one. There are some taxiways, lighting, signage and then the two runways. It's like building a brand new portion of the runway. We have to do it over the summer months because that's when we have the time to do it and less weather impacts."
Since cutting the amount of runways in half, Lea says the average taxi time has grown to about 20 minutes.
"At this point, it's about 10% more delays than it was a year ago without air field construction," Lea said. "So (the impact) hasn't been major."
Late last week, some travelers did see major delays. Several people reached out to KARE11 that they waited more than an hour on their planes waiting to take off last week after being told that the airport was down to a single runway.
According to Lea, weather conditions — combined with the construction closures — were to blame, giving air traffic controllers only one runway option for several hours on July 3, 4 and 5. Still, he says that type delay has been rare.
"It's happened about 8% of the time during the first month of the project," Lea said. "That complicates the operations for the air traffic controllers to get both arrivals and departures on a single runway."
Kyle Potter, Editor of the Thrifty Traveler, says the combination of construction, weather and huge volumes of travelers all play into the issue.
"It's just a numbers game," Potter said. "They have so many flights to get out every hour, every day and when things start to stack up and there's only one runway to get them in and out of, something has to break. What breaks is people end up delayed by hours or more."
Because runway availability can change so quickly, there's little anyone can do to avoid the wait, though Potter says avoiding peak times — and travel days — can improve your odds.
"We know based on looking at the data that there are more flights taking off and landing on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays than there are the rest of the week," he said. "So that is when I would at least expect to see some more problems just because, again, it's a numbers game."
Lea says weather is still the biggest variable, but they are working on minimizing the impact as much as they can.
"The FAA, the MAC and airlines are talking daily about how to work through some of these challenges," he said.
There is plenty of hope on the horizon. The project will be done by September and last year MSP was again ranked number one among global airports for timely flights.
"It is a marvel how efficient our airport is, and eventually the bill comes due, and the bill is coming due this summer, where, in order to make that it is an efficient, timely airport, they have to take care of their runways," Potter said. "Unfortunately, this is the price we pay for having one of the best airports in the country. They have to take care of their runways and they have to do it this summer."
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