page_title: O'Hare International Airport
section_title: Post-deregulation developments
hierarchical_section_title: O'Hare International Airport / History / Post-deregulation developments
caption_attribution_description: Brachiosaurus altithorax sauropod dinosaur (cast of holotype skeleton + reconstructed missing parts) from the Jurassic of Colorado, USA (mount owned by Field Museum of Natural History &amp; on display at O'Hare Airport's Terminal B in Chicago, Illinois, USA). Classification: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Dinosauria, Sauropodomorpha, Brachiosauridae Stratigraphy: Brushy Basin Member, Morrison Formation, Upper Jurassic Locality: Riggs Hill, near Fruita, western Colorado, USA Sauropod dinosaurs were the largest terrestrial animals ever. They all have the same basic body plan: large body with four walking legs, very long neck &amp; tail, and a small head relative to body size. Sauropods were herbivores, and are often perceived as holding their heads &amp; necks up high to reach vegetation normally out of reach to other organisms. Modern reconstructions of many sauropod species depict them with heads and necks held close to the horizontal, or at low angles above the horizontal.
context_page_description: O'Hare International Airport, typically referred to as O'Hare Airport, Chicago O'Hare, or simply O'Hare, is an international airport located on the Northwest Side of Chicago, Illinois, 14 miles northwest of the Loop business district. Operated by the Chicago Department of Aviation and covering 7,627 acres, O'Hare has non-stop flights to 228 destinations in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania as of 2018.
  Designed to be the successor to Chicago's "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 named after Edward "Butch" O'Hare, the U.S. Navy's first Medal of Honor recipient during that war. 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 as the first World's Busiest Airport of the jet age, holding that distinction from 1963 to 1998; today, it is the world's sixth-busiest airport, serving 83 million passengers in 2018.
context_section_description: 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 intense competition from United and American. Northwest likewise ceded O'Hare to the competition and shifted to a Minneapolis and Detroit-centered network by the early 1990s after acquiring Republic Airlines in 1986. Delta maintained a Chicago hub for some time, even commissioning a new Concourse L 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 Terminal 1 (dubbed "The Terminal for Tomorrow"), designed by Helmut Jahn. It was built between 1985 and 1987 on the site of the original Terminal 1; the structure, which includes 50 gates, is best known for its curved glass forms and the connecting underground passage between Concourses B and C. American renovated and expanded its existing facilities in Terminal 3 from 1987 to 1990; those renovations feature a flag-lined entrance hall to Concourses H/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 "Terminal 4" on the ground floor of the airport's central parking garage. International passengers were then bused to and from their aircraft. Relocation finally ended with the completion of the 21-gate International Terminal in 1993 (now called Terminal 5); 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 the Airport Transit System people-mover, 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 (4R/22L) 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 (OMP). 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 as well as 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, the lengthening of two existing runways, and the decommissioning of three old runways to provide O'Hare with six parallel runways and two crosswind runways.
  The OMP was the subject of lengthy 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, 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 (9C/27C) began in 2017. Its completion in 2021, along with an extension of runway 9R/27L, will conclude the OMP. Although construction continues, peak capacity (number of operations/hour) has already increased by 50% and total (all weather) system delays reduced by 57%; after completion of the first
caption: Reconstructed Brachiosaurus skeleton, formerly in the Field Museum, exhibited at the airport since 1999
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