ORD TRACON Controller reported issues with ORD Tower not letting the arrivals land on Runway 09L.

Date: 2022-04 · Aircraft: Any Unknown or Unlisted Aircraft Manufacturer · Phase: approach

Anomalies: atc-issue-all-types|no-specific-anomaly-occurred-unwanted-situation

Synopsis

ORD TRACON Controller reported issues with ORD Tower not letting the arrivals land on Runway 09L.

Narrative

At approximately XA:45Z; I was working the X position on the Arrival Wall; which coordinates and flows traffic appropriately to the runways in use at ORD. We were gearing up to land three runways; currently planning 9L/10C/10R. After sitting down and evaluating the traffic; I determined with the TMU and 2O positions that due to the amount of traffic on the SHAIN Arrival and the amount of heavy jets that are inbound the best runways for landing would be 9C/10C/10R because that would give us the TRACON two runways to use for heavy aircraft instead of just the one runway in the 9L/10C/10R configuration (10C being the only runway heavies can accept.) A call was placed to the Tower to ask what landing spacing we would need to land on 9C; and we were told by the Tower that 9C was unavailable for landing (not closed; just 'unavailable.'). We asked the reasoning for this and were told by ORD Tower that it was due to congestion. After looking at the [arrivals]; we noticed that there was no such congestion and again asked ORD Tower to land 9C for 45-50 minutes to alleviate complexity due to the amount the aircraft inbound and we're again denied the use of 9C. I then notified the Operations Manager of this reasoning and explained to him why it was a good use for us due to the amount of traffic inbound. For some reason that has yet to be explained to me there was approximately 8-12 billion dollars spent on adding runways and lengthening existing runways during the O'Hare Optimization Program. However; the ORD Tower limits the use of these runways based on the mood of the Supervisor in the Tower cab. This to me is absolutely baffling and quite honestly absurd that it's allowed to happen. There are certain occasions specifically on East Flow Operations like today where having two runways for heavy aircraft is extremely beneficial for the TRACON; even if there's spacing requirements at touchdown. This arrival push was one of those cases; because of this we had to slow a ZAU fix to accommodate this and we had to exponentially flow aircraft to different runways than intended which adds to complexity and workload of Controllers when quite frankly it's not needed. There needs to be agreed upon runways of use for three and two runway rushes between C90 and ORD Tower. Certain Supervisors at ORD Tower cannot be allowed to dictate which runways C90 is allowed to use when there are more than enough departure runways for them to use. Billions of dollars are being wasted because of this and it's quite frankly ridiculous.

Source: NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (public domain). Reports are voluntary submissions and are not verified by NASA.