Scale Back ORD World Gateway

E

Eagle

Guest
Local TV news tonight reference a Wednesday Chicago Sun-Times article that both UA and AA have asked to scale back the new World Gateway growth. No surprise in that this is not a good time to be moving forward with expanding airports based on airline revenue that is shaky at best for the time being.
 
What airport expansion is going on at O'hare? UAL's terminal was new 10 years ago and AA underwent a major upgrade and expansion about 5-7 years ago. Terminal 5, the international, was all new in 1995. So what's up?
 
ORD needs expansion. UA has nowhere to park all these new RJ's coming into the fleet. And ideally, we would like more mainline gates at ORD. So expansion is necessary if ORD is going to remain a vital conduit in the air transportation industry. Even though both airlines have lobbied for the expansion to be scaled back, you can bet that whatever expansion takes place will include some additional facilities for both carriers. But considering that neither company has the funds to allocate to this sort of capital spending, I'm not surprised by this.
 
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On 8/21/2002 8:51:13 AM

What airport expansion is going on at O'hare? UAL's terminal was new 10 years ago and AA underwent a major upgrade and expansion about 5-7 years ago. Terminal 5, the international, was all new in 1995. So what's up?
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In terms of terminal/gate expansion, here was the plan that was last floating around.

Build Terminal 6 east of Terminal 5. Then move US,HP,CO,NW,etc from Terminal 2 over to Terminal 6. Terminal 2 gets renovated and all remaining gates go to UA.

Demolish the "L" Concourse in Terminal 3 and replace with a small-sized Terminal 4 which AA would have (DL gets sent to Terminal 6 as well). This would require the moving of some of the refrigeration/utility buildings currently located near Concourse L. Also, a minor extension on Concourse K...add a few gates.

Also, I believe they wanted to add FIS/Customs to both Terminals 1 and 3 so that UA/AA can keep all international flights in their domestic terminals.

In total, the project would add somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 gates...though that number could vary.

There's also the runway reconfiguration project, Western access to O'Hare and a possible West Side terminal that connects to the other terminals via underground train.

How much of this all happens...is anyones guess.
 
Before Northwest purchased Republic, all those years ago, DTW didn't know where any of the international destinations served by Northwest were. Since Northwest got to DTW, KLM and Lufthansa as well as all the NW Int'l destinations are new. O'HARE has always been "A WORLD GATEWAY", Chicago has always been the number 1 midwest int'l destination for both foreign airlines serving the midwest and Hubs in the region. Just look at who serves O'HARE: KLM, Lufthansa, BA, AF, Swiss, Iberia, Alitalia, SAS, JAL, Singapore Airlines, All Nippon, Korean and too many others. Given Detroit is only a few hundred miles from Chicago most of these airlines will never fly to DTW. Then due to the car business DTW-Nagoya, Japan won't be copied at O'hare any time soon since Nagoya is the heart of the Japanesse car indusrty.
 
Even with your garbled reply. O'Hare still has COPIED a name belonging to NORTHWEST. Seems to me the Chicago Tribune hit it on the head "O'Hare should be VERY worried about the New Northwest WorldGateway at Detroit" It is so beneath such a great airport. Guess they like our marketing dept.