As Andrea Jack sat in a plane at O’Hare International Airport on Monday evening, she felt as though she were flying.
The problem — the plane hadn’t left the ground.
The 45-year-old was stuck on the aircraft as severe thunderstorms, and what is being investigated as potential tornados, swept the Chicago metro area, including at O’Hare. Even as the storms prompted the evacuation of Federal Aviation Administration facilities and caused hundreds of travelers to shelter in place inside the airport, some passengers aboard planes were forced to wait out the weather on the tarmac.
The O’Hare air traffic control tower evacuated during the storm, as did the FAA’s Terminal Radar Approach Control facility, known as TRACON, in Elgin, Illinois. That led to a ground stop at O’Hare, causing all planes to stop moving on the tarmac at the major hub airport, a spokesman for United Airlines, O’Hare’s largest carrier, said in a statement.
Once the FAA resumed staffing the facilities, airlines were able to move their planes again, United said.
But until then, passengers like Jack were stuck aboard planes that were buffeted by the storm’s strong winds. For about 10 minutes, she watched as the wings blew up and down, and the “pretty strong” wind caused items outside the window to blow around.
“The rain came in diagonally. It was crazy, it was really rocking the plane,” she said. “A lot of people were up, just going to the bathroom and just standing around, and the stewardesses were just buckled in, and we’re like, ‘Well, should we go buckle in?’”
The National Weather Service reported a wind gust of 75 miles per hour at O’Hare at 9:51 p.m. The storm was officially classified as a derecho, a thunderstorm that produces a swath of particularly damaging thunderstorm winds over an area at least 250 miles long.
The severe weather started to affect the city’s two airports around 9:20 p.m. Monday, the Chicago Department of Aviation said in a statement. It caused “minor damage” to the outside of some facilities at O’Hare, the agency said. Officials did not elaborate on which facilities were damaged.
No damage was reported at the smaller Midway Airport on the city’s Southwest Side, aviation officials said. And no injuries were reported at either airport.
During the storms, passengers and employees were ordered to shelter inside both airports, meaning they had to move away from windows and into any underground locations available, which is standard procedure for the city’s airports during tornado warnings. Passengers on at least some planes at O’Hare that were still parked at the gate were let inside to shelter in the airport.
After the storms passed, aviation department employees cleared the airfields of debris, and airline operations resumed shortly after 10:30 p.m., the department said.
As the air traffic control tower and TRACON facility evacuated, a different FAA center in west suburban Aurora took control of the airspace, following standard procedures, an FAA spokesman said.
Still, the situation led to images shared on social media of crowds jam-packed into parts of O’Hare, and stories of passengers riding out the storm in planes.
Jack, who had a layover in Chicago on her flight with American Airlines to Oregon after visiting family in Ireland, said she ended up spending about two hours on the plane. While no one appeared to panic during the storm, some young kids were crying loudly. The plane was also quite hot, she said, making it feel claustrophobic after a long wait.
Her flight was eventually canceled after an announcement said the pilot’s shift had ended, she said. She rebooked for Tuesday evening.
“There’s an act of God, and then there’s your shift time running out,” she joked.
In a statement, an American Airlines spokesperson said when operations resumed after stopping for the storm, American worked “swiftly” to return planes to their gates.
“The safety of our customers and team members is our top priority and we work together with our partners at the Chicago Department of Aviation (CDA) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to closely monitor airport and airfield conditions in inclement weather,” the spokesperson said. “We thank our team members for their professionalism and our customers for their understanding.”
Others were also stuck in planes at the airport Monday night. David Heinzmann, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, was on a United flight from O’Hare to Los Angeles. The pilots gave the flight attendants a “secure for takeoff signal” twice, but they didn’t go anywhere, he said. Soon after, the airline staff announced that they weren’t moving and didn’t have a plan.
Heinzmann looked at the window and saw multiple planes on neighboring runways. It started getting hot on the plane, he said, as he got notice from friends of the tornado warning. A flight attendant said they didn’t have the ability to go back to the gate, but they weren’t able to offer much more information.
At that point, he said some people on the plane started freaking out. A young woman in front of him was talking to someone on the phone to calm down, while another passenger from California asked what a tornado was like because she had never experienced one. It wasn’t raining much, and felt a bit “ominous” because everyone knew a huge storm was coming.
When the storm eventually started around 9:45 p.m., Heinzmann said he heard a “thick rumble” noise outside the plane from wind, and the plane started to rock hard. He couldn’t see clearly outside the window because of the heavy rain.
“For about a minute and a half, it was very frightening, where I didn’t know if the plane was going to stay on the ground or if it was going to flip or get turned or have the roof ripped off,” he said. “It felt very vulnerable.”
The storm lasted about 10 or 15 minutes, eventually dissipating into a normal rainstorm, he said. After sitting for about another hour, passengers got off and got back on the plane before it took off, he said. After that, it was “fairly normal” albeit “a bit bumpy,” he said. All in all, he said it was around a four-and-a-half-hour delay landing in LA.
“It felt like the flight crew and the flight deck really didn’t have information,” he said. “That felt pretty disconcerting while I was getting reports from my phone that there was an actual tornado touching down at O’Hare Airport and we were all stuck out there in an airplane.”
“If you’re at the airport in a building, you had to go to the basement. If you were at the airport in an airplane, you were stuck on the runway in the middle of the path of the storm,” he added.
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