Diverted Denver planes give boost to Cheyenne Regional Airport (KCYS), Wyoming

CHEYENNE - It's not every day one sees the bright blue of a Southwest Airlines jet tooling across the tarmac at Cheyenne Regional Airport.

But that was just the case on Thursday, when Southwest and several other airlines saw planes diverted to Cheyenne due to inclement weather in Denver.

The large number of diverted flights - eight in all - prompted airport staff to send out pictures on Twitter with hashtags like "#planeseverywhere" and "#tightsqueeze."

Summer is a busy season for diverted flights in Cheyenne due to the greater occurrence of thunderstorms in the Denver area.

Frank Cooper, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Boulder, Colorado, said the primary hazard posed by thunderstorms is wind shear, which can affect the plane's trajectory as it makes its approach to Denver International Airport.

"In the summertime, you get a lot of colliding outflow boundaries, and what that does is it changes the wind direction suddenly when they're moving through the airport," Cooper said. "Because of that, they'll tend to delay the incoming flights until things settle."

Cooper said the NWS issues regular terminal forecasts four times each day to inform air traffic controllers of what kind of weather they can expect over the next 30 hours.

"Basically, we're concerned about winds, wind shifts, visibilities, cloud ceilings and any kind of precipitation in the area," he said. "The meteorologists up at Longmont will talk to us, and then they'll talk to the air traffic controllers directly. So they're using our input, but they make the final call."

Cheyenne Regional Airport deputy director of aviation Jim Schell said the airport handles anywhere from 80 to 100 diverted flights each summer, sometimes as many as a dozen at a time.

"Cheyenne Regional Airport serves as a pretty major diversion airport for Denver International, as do a couple of other airports in the region," Schell said. "Aircraft will typically get diverted to Cheyenne, Pueblo or Colorado Springs."

Which city the planes go to is often determined by where they're coming from, with Cheyenne often handling flights approaching Denver from the north, east or west. Schell said most diverted planes spend one to two hours at the airport, taking off once the weather in Denver has cleared.

But that's not always the case. When many planes have been diverted at the same time, or if the bad weather is exceptionally persistent, diverted planes may have to resort to deplaning entirely while they wait to be refueled.

"We can take right around 100 people in our sterile holding area, but anything over that, they would need to be deplaned back into the main area at the terminal, and they'd have to be rescreened to get back on the plane," Schell said. "It doesn't happen all that often, so if we get 80 flights in a summer, we might see a handful - five or less - that have to deplane the entire plane."

Due to the unpredictable nature of flight diversions, the airport's fixed base operator, Legend AeroServe, makes sure to stock up on fuel during the summer, since most planes that are diverted here require additional fuel to make it the rest of the way to Denver.

Schell noted that gas sales and commercial landing fees can actually provide a bit of a boost to the airport's finances, though overall, flight diversions make up only a small part of the airport's overall operations.

"We can handle quite a few. Really the biggest factor in that is how much fuel we have on hand," he said. "But in the big picture, as the airport side of it goes, it's a relatively small financial impact."

- Source:  http://www.wyomingnews.com