I flew over Monday morning. I knew the weather had been bad over the weekend. I had no idea what the traffic was going to be.
I was in a descent from crossing Lake Michigan and listening to the ATIS. The holding patterns around both lakes were saturated. As I got below 4,500 the altitude filtering came off and my moving map lit up with traffic. I was dumbfounded. The Fisk controller was trying to send aircraft in as fast as he could, but they were already stacked up and arriving faster than the airport could take them.
Then I heard some bickering on the ATC frequency. "This guy isn't flying the hold properly." "I just got cutoff." "Hey, I have been holding here for 68 minutes!" "I've been holding for 75 minutes." It was a high stress environment and nerves were definitely on edge.
Then I heard two calls in succession "Fuel Emergency." ATC brought them to the front of the line and let them in.
My lovely bride was upset. We were going into a small area that had 200+ airplanes - more arriving than leaving -- hazy day -- long wait to just get into the back of the line. If it isn't fun, don't do it. My wife said "I want to go home." It was an intelligent reaction and we left.
I made it in Wednesday morning. No holding. Right to Ripon and in to 36R.
I got some idea of how bad things had been. It seems it was worse than I imagined.
FWIW, to me the logical solution is to have a reservation system. I CAN NOT imagine implementing a system on that scale and having it work smoothly. I think it would create more problems. Logical, not practical.
ATC knew the system was saturated. They didn't have an answer and some of the things they tried just threw more gas on the fire.
My thought is they need a way to cut the number of aircraft down in a fair and even way. I like the tail number idea. I pulled the FAA Registration Database from 2017. I removed the commercial aircraft. I reduced the list down to the last letter or number in the tail number. E.g. If it was listed as N1234B, I took the "B". Everyone knows the last character in their own tail number.
I found what percentage of the fleet the tail numbers were based on their last letter. If ATC decided things were saturated and they needed to shed load, they would go to a 2, 3, 4 group solution. Not in the current group, you must stay clear by X miles. Groups rotate every X minutes until open arrivals can resume.
Put a chart in the NOTAM.