Is your plane safe from a tornado? -

The message appeared on social media channels late Monday night: “Severe weather is imminent at O’Hare International Airport.” The National Weather Service issued tornado warnings. Wind gusts roared at 75 mph. Federal Aviation Administration workers briefly evacuated areas at the airport, including the control tower.

Aviation officials in Chicago said Tuesday that the severe weather hit O’Hare and Midway International airports around 9:20 p.m. local time. Both airports engaged their safety plans, requiring travelers and workers to seek shelter away from windows into underground locations.

From the tarmac, several people who reported they were sitting on planes during the storms asked: what about us?

Plane passengers waited out a severe storm as it moved over Chicago O'Hare International Airport on July 15. (Video: John Farrell/The Washington Post)

Travelers took to social media to describe waiting on board at O’Hare while aircraft rocked in the wind, listening to storm alerts blare from their phones. Similar scenes unfolded at Chicago Midway.

“We sit here in a tin can with wings,” wrote one X user, posting a video showing rain streaming down a window and lightning flashing.

On TikTok, a user posted a video from a basement area at O’Hare and wrote that her flight actually boarded before a flight attendant told everyone to get out due to a tornado.

“I was expecting the plane to just be torn in half at some point,” Justin Smolenski, who was stuck on a Spirit Airlines plane, told The Washington Post. When it wasn’t, he decided that “either planes are built really well, or we were very lucky.”

NWS would later confirm 11 tornadoes were in the Chicago forecast area during the storm, but planned to continue investigating potential damage paths on Wednesday to identify additional sites.

Tornado protocol for airports

Because of their aerodynamic designs, aircraft are easy to loft if air flows over the wings quickly enough. If wind speeds reach, say, 90 or 100 mph, you’ll start seeing commercial aircraft moved or smaller aircraft thrown. And that’s just for straight-line winds.

Tornadoes, meanwhile, bring their own lift with them. They are vortices of powerful upward suction. Even a lower-end tornado, like a high-end EF1 with 100 mph winds, could flip aircraft. And a “significant” tornado with 120 mph winds could throw them, especially considering a tornado’s rotating or changing winds. If a tornado hit a fully loaded passenger aircraft, a mass casualty event could ensue. The majority of tornado fatalities stem from head injuries and blunt force trauma, which could result if a plane were thrown.

It wasn’t clear why passengers on Monday night had been loaded onto planes and sent onto the tarmac ahead of the line of severe storms. Chicago aviation officials directed questions about aircraft movements to the FAA. That agency referred questions about why passengers were boarded to airlines.

Once fliers were out on the tarmac, aviation experts say, that’s where they had to stay for their own safety. A tornado striking a plane could be disastrous, but so could leaving the shelter of the aircraft.

“In a situation like this, the safest option is for customers and crews to stay in the aircraft and for our teams to stay indoors,” United Airlines spokesman Charles Hobart said in an email.

He said that the carrier works to operate “safely and efficiently” ahead of a storm hitting, but adjusting immediate plans too far ahead of an impact could disrupt customers’ travel plans.

“We rely on our safety procedures to ensure we are making the right decisions, operate when we can and clearly pause when we can’t,” Hobart wrote.

Other carriers contacted by The Washington Post, including American and Spirit, did not explain when asked about their decisions to board passengers before the Monday evening storms hit.

Denver International Airport, located in an area that has seen dozens of tornadoes in the past 50 years, said in an email that operations teams would not send people out to aircraft with stair trucks and buses during a tornado warning. Airlines make decisions about how they are going to operate their planes, the airport’s statement said.

“If an airplane is boarding or deplaning during an event, the plan is for passengers and flight crew to deplane and immediately go to shelter,” the statement said.

Mike McCormick, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University with more than three decades of experience at the FAA, said in an interview that once lighting is spotted, ramp activity stops at the airport. That would make returning to the gate “not a practical alternative.”

Doug Moss, a retired airline pilot, aviation instructor and safety consultant, said in an email that ramp workers are needed for a plane to back out from a gate or park at one. He said he’s been in that situation many times.

“We were just about ready to push back and we get a call from Ops that all the ramp workers were ordered inside,” he wrote. “Therefore, we just had to sit there until the thunderstorm and lightning passed.”

Leaving a plane via stairs or a jet bridge could be risky due to wind or lightning, Kathleen Bangs, a former pilot and the spokeswoman for the flight-tracking site FlightAware, said in an email.

Chris Cooper, an adjunct professor at the University of North Dakota’s Aviation Department, said airlines will make the call whether to delay or cancel a flight due to approaching weather. But sometimes a flight might be boarded and ready to go when weather suddenly worsens. At an airport with limited space, there may not be anywhere to go.

“You’re certainly not going to fly right into the weather,” said Cooper, who is also an airline pilot.

McCormick and Cooper both said that planes can withstand high winds on the ground. Moving a plane in bad weather could also be dangerous because of reduced visibility. McCormick said the risk “is generally going to be greater if you try to move versus waiting it out.”

No one at either Chicago airport was injured Monday, according to the Chicago Department of Aviation. Staffers found minor damage to the outside of some O’Hare facilities, but did not immediately spot damage at Midway.

American Airlines said in a statement that employees “worked swiftly to return aircraft to the gate” once ground operations resumed at O’Hare following the storm-related pause. The statement said American works with Chicago aviation officials and the FAA to “closely monitor airport and airfield conditions in inclement weather.”

“After the all-clear was given and the FAA resumed its staffing, airlines — including United — were able to resume their operation and safely move aircraft,” Hobart wrote. “Our staff and crew do their best to always ensure everyone’s safety.”

After workers cleared debris from the airfields, operations started shortly after 10:30 p.m. Monday. Normal FAA operations resumed just after 11 p.m.; the Chicago Air Route Traffic Control Center assumed the airspace during the evacuation, the agency said. FAA, which routes planes away from bad weather, “briefly paused” flights into O’Hare and Midway on Monday night.

According to FlightAware, there were 786 delays and 132 cancellations at O’Hare and 214 delays and 71 cancellations at Midway on Monday.

Past tornadoes and close calls

Over the years, dangerous weather, including tornadoes and tropical storm-level winds, have swept by — and even through — airports. The National Weather Service warns that tornadoes “are capable of completely destroying well-made structures, uprooting trees, and hurling objects through the air like deadly missiles.”

In the early morning hours of March 3, 2020, tornadoes plowed through parts of Nashville and hit John C. Tune Airport, a sister facility to Nashville International that caters to smaller regional, corporate and private planes. It caused nearly $100 million in infrastructure damage, but that estimated cost from the airport didn’t include 90 aircraft that were destroyed.

A 2011 tornado at St. Louis Lambert International Airport tore off part of the roof of a concourse, sent people scrambling for shelter in restrooms and pushed planes away from jet bridges, CNN reported. One passenger reported that the plane she was on shook violently and experienced air pressure changes.

After Oklahoma City officials issued a tornado warning in May 2015, two arriving Delta planes were stranded on the tarmac at the Will Rogers World Airport. Ground crews fled to an underground tunnel for safety, unintentionally leaving the passengers onboard. About 15 minutes later, according to local reports, help arrived and the travelers were escorted to a shelter.

In July 2023, a funnel alighted near Chicago O’Hare. The airlines canceled nearly 170 flights and delayed 500 takeoffs, according to FlightAware. Inside the airport, video from that evening showed passengers cramming into a concourse for safety.

In late May of this year, powerful storms with winds gusting up to 80 mph pushed an American Airlines plane parked at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

One long night

At O’Hare on Monday night, Smolenski and his family were looking forward to returning home to San Diego when they found themselves trapped on the plane after boarding a leg to Las Vegas.

“We got on the plane, taxied onto the runway, and we stopped, and we waited, and we waited, and we waited some more,” he said. “And while we’re waiting, it started to rain and it started to thunder.”

Soon afterward, he and the rest of the flight received emergency broadcast alerts on their phones, warning of possible tornadoes in the area. Though the pilot spoke over the loudspeaker to tell the passengers not to worry about the alerts — “it’s just a little rain,” Smolenski remembered him saying — the father of young kids could feel the plane shaking.

As the storm raged, he said his kids were “absolutely panicking.” The wait on the tarmac ended up stretching to four hours, Smolenski said.

By the time the plane took off from O’Hare and landed in Las Vegas, it was late at night, and the family had missed their connecting flight. Without a hotel voucher, they slept in the airport until finding an early morning flight to San Diego, with another connection in Sacramento, and arriving home over 12 hours later than anticipated.

“It was brutal,” Smolenski said, calling the whole ordeal an “absolute nightmare.”

He said there was one final indignity.

“On top of it all, Spirit’s like, ‘Yeah, we lost your bags,'” he said.

Staff writer Andrea Sachs contributed to this report

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMGzrdWeo2hqYGeBcHyWaGhwZ5OdtqStxqhkqaSRo7JuwM6rpZqcn2Kuqr7PqKmtZZ%2BdrrOxjg%3D%3D