Known as the world’s “most connected airport”, this airport is home to a record-breaking eight landing strips and a helipad.
Covering an area of 7,627 acres – or 11.9 miles – the American airport has six parallel and two crosswind runways, enabling three aircraft to land simultaneously.
Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) is the United States’ fourth busiest and seventh biggest, earning it the nickname of the “busiest square mile in the world”. From 1963 to 1998, it was the world’s busiest airport, and remains one of them today, at spot number nine just behind LAX.
In 2019, it recorded 919,704 aircraft movements, with an average of 2,520 a day, the most in the world in part because of the large number of regional flights.
In 2023, O-Hare handled over 73 million passengers. It handles non-stop flights to 214 destinations across the world.
From the 1980s onwards, the airport faced increasing delays because of its inefficient runway layout; the airfield had remained unchanged since the addition of its last new runway in 1971.
The O’Hare Modernization Plan (OMP) which the Chicago Department of Aviation (CDA) committed to in 2001 was the subject of several legal battles, including 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, with some of the cases not being resolved until 2011.
These issues, plus the reduction in traffic as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, 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 another of its runways completed in 2021, concluded the OMP.
In 2018, the airport committed to “O-Hare 21” a new Terminal Area Plan to build two new concorses and expand terminals 2 and 5 with additional gates, lounges and updates to airport-wide operations.
The budget was originally set as a staggering $8.5 billion – over £6.8 billion – and would add 280,000-square-metres to the terminals. However, in 2023, the project cost ballooned far above that budget and resulted in calls for the project to be scaled or even cancelled by American Airlines and United Airlines.
Last week, the CDA and its construction partners celebrated the placement of the final beam in Terminal 5’s new six-story car park, a “topping-off” that marks the latest milestone in the city’s efforts to modernise O’Hare. With 2,600 spaces, this will double the amount of parking available for the terminal.
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