Runway question? Is this normal? (please help)?

Question

About how many commercial planes leave a runway every hour? I'm in Memphis, TN and over the past half hour, about one plane (or more) has flown over every single minute. Is that normal? What could it be? Thank you.

Answer 1

I don't know anything about Memphis but one aircraft handling per minute is certainly not unusual at places like Chicago's O'Hare or London's Heatrow.

The problem is that we still have an increase in flights and the bottleneck, today, is the handling of aircraft on the ground. Approaches to final can now be done in arcs and not in line so time can be saved in the spacing but if, e.g. the pilot is given an exit way and can't brake fast enough to do that exit but must take another one, he will certainly get complains from the tower as this slows down all the other aircraft on final approach. That's how tight airport handling is today!