Two-Way Use of One Runway

[seacue]

I was watching the planes at DCA this afternoon (yes I'm a geek) and an infrequent thing happened again. Planes were taking off Rwy 01 to the north, but they fit one in to take off to the south on the same Rwy 19. It appeared that they waited until there was a long gap in arrivals. Since the "nonconforming" plane was an RJ IIRC, I couldn't understand a technical reason. The wind was at about 90-deg to the runway and not strong.

I'd seen this years ago when a 727 refused the direction in use because of being heavy and it would have been a tailwind takeoff.

I know of some airports where arrivals and departure are always in the reverse directions, but they generally don't have much traffic compared with one-a-minute DCA.

My question: do you folks often see "bothways" use of the active runway at heavily-used airports?

[Onan the Clumsy]

Not often, but I do it if the wind and traffic allow. They want the freight moving quickly and one place we go to ha s a looooong runway with the cargo ramp at one end. If I can, I'll take that direction and do a 180 on the runway. I ask for it first of course :}

[vector4fun]

Seacue,

At my airport, we do an "Opposite Direction" operation maybe a half dozen times a day. In our case, the tower controller would first have to check with the finals controller, whose airspace the departure will transit, and then with the feeder controller who will actually work the departure out. If either of them say no, then, of course, we can't. We only do it during light traffic of course, usually late night or early morning. It's pretty hard to provide standard radar and wake turbulence separation on an opposite direction op while still complying with noise abatement procedures, whcih require the departure to climb straight out for a few miles if it's a turbojet. On then other hand, a FedEx Caravan can do a 90 degree turn at mid-field, so little problem, except that if we let the Caravan do it all the time, then EVERYBODY wants to do it too.....:hmm:

[seacue]

My examples for DCA were during periods of an operation at least every 2 minutes.

I'd guess they are averaging about an operation every 90 seconds for hours on end. All their runways intersect and the jets mostly use the long one. The airport has so little ground area that planes don't sit around for long times between flights. They are generally in one hour, out the next.

See http://www.fly.faa.gov/Products/AADC/aadc.html for an example of arrival traffic demand. Double click on DCA. Time shown is UTC/zulu.

[GlueBall]

At BOG, usually from 10 PM until 6 AM, arrivals are on Rwy 13L, departures are on Rwy 31R.