O'Hare International Airport
Chicago O'Hare International Airport is the primary international airport serving Chicago, Illinois, United States, located on the city's Northwest Side, approximately northwest of downtown. The airport is operated by the Chicago Department of Aviation and covers. O'Hare has non-stop flights to 249 destinations in North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the North Atlantic region as of summer 2024. As of 2024, O'Hare is considered the most connected airport in the United States, and fifth most connected airport in the world. It is also the world's fourth busiest airport and 16th largest airport. It is the airport with the most runways in the world.
Designed to be the successor to Chicago's Midway International Airport, itself once nicknamed the "busiest square mile in the world", O'Hare began as an airfield serving a Douglas manufacturing plant for C-54 military transports during World War II. It was renamed Orchard Field Airport in the mid-1940s and assigned the IATA code ORD. In 1949, it was renamed after aviator Edward "Butch" O'Hare, the U.S. Navy's first Medal of Honor recipient during World War II. As the first major airport planned after World War II, O'Hare's innovative design pioneered concepts such as concourses, direct highway access to the terminal, jet bridges, and underground refueling systems.
O'Hare became famous during the jet age, holding the distinction as the world's busiest airport by passenger traffic from 1963 to 1998. It still ranks as one of the busiest airports in the world, according to the Airports Council International rankings. In 2019, O'Hare had 919,704 aircraft movements, averaging 2,520 per day, the most of any airport in the world, in part because of a large number of regional flights. On the ground, road access to the airport is offered by airport shuttle, bus, the Chicago "L", or taxis. The Kennedy Expressway goes directly into the airport. O'Hare is a hub for American Airlines and United Airlines, as well as an operating base for Frontier Airlines and Spirit Airlines.
History
Establishment and defense efforts
Soon after the opening of Chicago Municipal Airport in 1926, the City of Chicago realized more airport capacity would be needed. The city government investigated various sites in the 1930s but made little progress before America's entry into World War II.O'Hare began as a manufacturing plant for Douglas C-54 Skymasters during World War II and adjoining Douglas Field Airport. The site was originally known as a small German-American farming community known as Orchard Place. The plant, in the northeast corner of what is now the airport, needed easy access to the workforce of Chicago—the nation's second-largest city at the time, as well as needing railroads and location far from enemy threat. 655 C-54s were built at the plant, more than half of all produced. The airfield, from which the C-54s flew out, was known as Douglas Airport; initially, it had four runways. This was also the location of the Army Air Force's 803rd Specialized Depot, a unit charged with storing many captured enemy aircraft; a few representatives of this collection would eventually be transferred to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
Douglas Company's contract ended with the war's conclusion. Douglas considered building airliners at Orchard but chose to concentrate civil production at its headquarters in Santa Monica, California. With the departure of Douglas, the complex took the name Orchard Airport, and was assigned the IATA code ORD. The only remaining building of the Douglas Aircraft Factory is the Administration building now used by the City of Chicago, Department of Aviation.
The United States Air Force used the old Douglas Field apron extensively during the Korean War; the airport then had no scheduled airline service. Although not its primary base in the area, the Air Force used O'Hare as a fighter base; it was home to the 62nd Fighter-Interceptor Squadron flying North American F-86 Sabres from 1950 to 1959. By 1960, the need for O'Hare as an active duty fighter base was diminishing, just as commercial business was picking up at the airport. The Air Force removed active-duty units from O'Hare and turned the station over to Continental Air Command, enabling them to base reserve and Air National Guard units there. As a result of a 1993 agreement between the City and the Department of Defense, the reserve base was closed on April 1, 1997, ending its career as the home of the 928th Airlift Wing and of the 126th Air Refueling Wing in 1999. At that time, the remaining site came under the ownership of the Chicago Department of Aviation and made way for the O'Hare Modernization Plan.
Early commercial development
In 1945, Chicago mayor Edward Kelly established a board to choose the site of a new airport to meet future demand. After considering various proposals, the board decided upon the Orchard Field site and acquired most of the federal government property in March 1946. The military retained a small parcel of property on the site and the right to use 25% of the airfield's operating capacity for free.Ralph H. Burke devised an airport master plan based on the pioneering idea of what he called "split finger terminals", allowing a terminal building to be attached to "airline wings", each providing space for gates and planes. Burke's design also included underground refueling, direct highway access to the front of terminals, and direct rail access from downtown, all of which are utilized at airports worldwide today. O'Hare was the site of the world's first jet bridge in 1958, and successfully adapted slip form paving, developed for the nation's new Interstate highway system, for seamless concrete runways.
In 1949, the City renamed the facility O'Hare Airport to honor Edward "Butch" O'Hare, the U.S. Navy's first flying ace and Medal of Honor recipient in World War II. However, its IATA code remained unchanged, resulting in O'Hare being one of the few IATA codes bearing no connection to the airport's name or metropolitan area.
Arrival of passenger service and subsequent growth
Scheduled passenger service began in 1955, but growth was slow at first. Although Chicago had invested over $25 million in O'Hare, Midway remained the world's busiest airport and airlines were reluctant to move until highway access and other improvements were completed. The April 1957 Official Airline Guide listed 36 weekday departures from O'Hare, while Midway had 414. Improvements began to attract the airlines: O'Hare's first international terminal opened in August 1958, and by April 1959 the airport had expanded to with new hangars, terminals, parking and other facilities. The expressway link to downtown Chicago, now known as the Kennedy Expressway, was completed in 1960. New Terminals2 and3, designed by C. F. Murphy and Associates, opened on January 1, 1962.The biggest factor driving airlines to relocate their operations from Midway to O'Hare was the jet airliner; the first scheduled jet at O'Hare was an American 707 from New York to Chicago to San Francisco on March 22, 1959. Midway, a square on each side, had no space for the runways that 707s and DC-8s required. Airlines had been reluctant to move to O'Hare, but they naturally did not want to split their operations: in July 1962, the last fixed-wing scheduled airline flight in Chicago moved from Midway to O'Hare. Until United returned in July 1964, Midway's only scheduled airline was Chicago Helicopter Airways. The arrival of Midway's traffic quickly made O'Hare the world's busiest airport, serving 10 million passengers annually. Within two years, that number would double, with Chicagoans boasting that more people passed through O'Hare in 12 months than Ellis Island had processed in its entire existence. O'Hare remained the world's busiest airport until it was eclipsed by Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in 1998.
O'Hare had four runways in 1955; The runway 14R/32L opened in 1956 and was extended to a few years later, allowing nonstops to Europe. Runway 9R/27L opened in 1968 and runway 4R/22L in 1971.
Post-deregulation developments
In the 1980s, after passage of US airline deregulation, the first major change at O'Hare occurred when TWA left Chicago for St. Louis as its main mid-continent hub. Although TWA had a large hangar complex at O'Hare and had started Constellation nonstops to Paris in 1958, by the time of deregulation its operation was losing $25 million a year under competition from United and American. Northwest likewise ceded O'Hare to the competition and shifted to a Minneapolis/St. Paul and Detroit-centered network by the early 1990s after acquiring Republic Airlines in 1986. Delta maintained an O'Hare hub for some time, even commissioning a new ConcourseL in 1983. Ultimately, Delta found competing from an inferior position at O'Hare too expensive and closed its Chicago hub in the 1990s, concentrating its upper Midwest operations at Cincinnati.The dominant hubs established at O'Hare in the 1980s by United and American continue to operate today. United developed a new two-concourse Terminal1, designed by Helmut Jahn. It was built between 1985 and 1987 on the site of the original Terminal1; the structure, which includes 50 gates, is best known for its curved glass forms and the connecting underground tunnel between ConcoursesB andC. The tunnel is illuminated with a neon installation titled Sky's the Limit by Canadian artist Michael Hayden, which plays an airy, slow-tempo version of Rhapsody in Blue. American renovated and expanded its existing facilities in Terminal3 from 1987 to 1990; those renovations feature a flag-lined entrance hall to ConcoursesH/K.
The demolition of the original Terminal 1 in 1984 to make way for Jahn's design forced a "temporary" relocation of international flights into facilities called "Terminal4" on the ground floor of the airport's central parking garage. International passengers were then transferred by bus to and from their aircraft. Relocation finally ended with the completion of the 21-gate International Terminal in 1993 ; it contains all customs facilities. Its location, on the site of the original cargo area and east of the terminal core, necessitated the construction of a peoplemover, which connected the terminal core with the new terminal as well as remote rental and parking lots.
Following deregulation and the buildup of the American and United hubs, O'Hare faced increasing delays from the late 1980s onward due to its inefficient runway layout; the airfield had remained unchanged since the addition of its last new runway in 1971. O'Hare's three pairs of angled runways were meant to allow takeoffs into the wind, but they came at a cost: the various intersecting runways were both dangerous and inefficient. Official reports at the end of the 1990s ranked O'Hare as one of the worst-performing airports in the United States based on the percentage of delayed flights. In 2001, the Chicago Department of Aviation committed to an O'Hare Modernization Plan . Initially estimated at $6.6 billion, the OMP was to be paid by bonds issued against the increase in the federal passenger facility charge enacted that year and federal airport improvement funds. The modernization plan was approved by the FAA in October 2005 and involved a complete reconfiguration of the airfield. The OMP included the construction of four new runways, lengthening two existing runways, and decommissioning three old runways to provide O'Hare with six parallel runways and two crosswind runways.
The OMP was the subject of legal battles, both with suburbs who feared the new layout's noise implications as well as with survivors of persons interred in a cemetery the city proposed to relocate; some of the cases were not resolved until 2011. These issues, plus the reduction in traffic as a result of the Great Recession, delayed the OMP's completion; construction of the sixth and final parallel runway began in 2016. Its completion in 2020, along with an extension of runway 9R/27L completed in 2021, concluded the OMP.