United Express routinely flies into the Eastern Iowa Airport (KCID) generally from Chicago and Denver hubs. These photos of arriving and departing aircraft are from last week's visit to the airport when a special NASA jet flew in for avionic testing.
United Express flies Embraer ERJ-145s planes in and out of the major hubs to spoke metro markets like Cedar Rapids.
In the foreground is a waiting area where departing planes stop to receive final permission to get airborne. I'm no expert but believe that departing pilots talk to both the Cedar Rapids tower and regional control in Chicago for the go-ahead to fly.
Arriving aircraft make their way past the tower and eventually to the passenger terminal. In years past United Airlines flew 737s to Cedar Rapids. Now smaller capacity, but higher occupancy aircraft continues the decades long tradition of serving the City of Five Seasons.
I'm a retired controller who finished out his service with 12 1/2 years at CID.
ReplyDeleteUnless there is some sort of weather impact for planes going to Denver, we never had to check with anyone prior to releasing the planes for departure. For O'Hare-bound aircraft, all aircraft had to have a release from the O'Hare controllers. When the plane called ready to taxi for departure, we'd give him clearance to taxi and call ORD for a release. Depending on conditions, we'd get an immediate release or perhaps a few minutes hold before release. If weather impacted traffic flow, then every flight would have an expect departure clearance time (EDCT) already printed on the strip, and when the pilot called clearance delivery for his outbound clearance, he'd receive that EDCT. They'd then usually wait until about 10 min or less time before the EDCT before starting up and asking for taxi. Those EDCT's could be anywhere from a few minutes past their filed proposed departure time to even hours delay!
Other large airports with weather impacting flow would also have EDCTs, but since we didn't have direct lines for releasing, we'd just release them on the EDCT. This applied to airlines as well as corporate aircraft.
For any but ORD-bound aircraft (or EDCT aircraft for any field), we cleared them for T.O. when they were ready, and then the tower would transfer control of the aircraft to departure control downstairs when they were about 1/2 mile from the runway. Departure control would then have control until it was time to pass them into another controller's airspace.