Ever Wonder How Much It Costs To Plow An Airport Runway In a Snowstorm?
I wonder about all kinds of weird things related to travel. And yet, I somehow never bothered to figure out how much it costs for an airport to deal with a snowstorm.
Thanks to a very timely retweet by Brian Sumers (who you should definitely be following), I actually figured out the cost for my home airport of Washington-Dulles:
The Final Two Pennies
$25,000 an hour? Wow. $700K for one piece of equipment doesn’t entirely shock me. But, $25,000 an hour is a pretty steep price tag to deal with mother nature. Just in case you were crazy enough to think it was easy to run an airport…..
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This is one reason why uber expensive heated runways seems to make sense to me.
Dan, I wonder what maintenance is like on them? And, it’s all the other ramps and tributaries that need to be maintained that might make it untenable.
Dan, although I would imagine you could use that technology for new construction, additional runways. It has to get affordable at some point.
The $25,000 is not out-of-pocket additional costs. It includes probably depreciation on the equipment and allocation of what the spokesman referred to as “full-time” salaried employees that get paid snow or no snow.
Ron, sounded like those employees have other jobs. So, would only make sense to attribute their hours to snow removal during a storm. That doesn’t happen very often in this neck of the woods.
Closing an airport’s runways costs a lot more than $25000 per hour
John, I’m sure it does. Still not sure $25,000 an hour is an accurate cost to keep one open.