All airports with multiple simultaneous active runways do the same thing. ATL's parallel runways make it easy to picture. Anything to/from the north'ish uses the northern pair and visa-versa for the south. The paths never cross. ORD's plan is decidedly more complex. I've done a ORD-YVR departing off of 4L with a heading of 090 due to winds. We reached 15,000 ft about 10 minutes still going straight east. Overhead on channel 9 was even the pilot reminding ATC that we were heading to *Vancouver*. YYZ's archaic runway layout will make it feel like you are driving half way to your destination if you are flying AC and departures are to the east-north-east. Amazingly these taxi-times based on active runway selections are built into the scheduled times that you'll find on a Flight Status website. Matthew -----Original Message----- From: The Airline List [mailto:AIRLINE@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU] On Behalf Of Mark Greenwood Sent: January 3, 2002 10:00 PM To: AIRLINE@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU Subject: Re: Lax south runways can they handle a 747? I believe the choice of runway for departure and arrival is determined by the origin/destination of the aircraft. Every time I have flown to the South Pacific ex LAX we have always departed from and arrived back on the south runways. Flight to Asia and Europe have always arrived and departed on the north runways. Mark W Wilson wrote: > Absolutely....7R/25L is actually longer than the other parallel on the > southside at 11,096 feet. (the inner south runway 7L/25R is 12,091 > feet). Your concern is notable however. It's more based on procedure > at airports with two sets of parallels on each side of the airport. > Normal ops include allowing aircraft to depart on the inner parallels > while landing (usually) on the outer parallels allowing greater > separation on approach. So for whatever reason..."they" decided to > depart from 25L. It could also be to expedite the departure of > traffic behing the KAL 747, so they moved it on over to the other side > to make room, amongst a couple more operational considerations. > [snip]