Chicago Midway flights resume after virus fears shut its tower

Bloomberg

Flights to Chicago’s Midway Airport resumed, ending a temporary halt that occurred after technicians who work in the air-traffic control tower tested positive for the Covid-19 virus.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had blocked flights departing from other airports to Midway as it switched control to a nearby air-traffic facility, according to an agency flight-tracking website. The restriction was lifted then. There were 184 arrivals and departures cancelled at Midway, almost 30% of all flights and the most for any US airport, according to the flight-tracking site FlightAware.com.
The tower remained closed to “ensure a safe work environment, ” the FAA said. National Air Traffic Controllers Association union demanded that the tower be shut down so that it could be “disinfected according to appropriate public health standards,” the union said.
The union also asked the FAA to coordinate with local health officials and the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention to test all controllers and technicians at the facility.
Flights are allowed to land
at airports without a control tower under FAA rules that require pilots to announce themselves over a common radio frequency. Typically, only one arrival or departure is allowed at a time, reducing capacity.
A nearby air-traffic facility that oversees flights in the Chicago region took over some of the duties that the Midway tower would have performed.
Even after the halt was lifted, the flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed almost no flight activity at Midway, a stark contrast to the arrivals and departures at nearby O’Hare International.
The FAA’s controllers have contingency plans for halting flights throughout the aviation system and can track aircraft and communicate with them from other nearby facilities.