Establishment and defense efforts on display in O'Hare's Terminal 2, restored in the markings of
"Butch" O'Hare's plane 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. 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. 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. 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 (OMP).
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. 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 (
ORD) remained unchanged, resulting in O'Hare being one of the few IATA codes bearing no connection to the airport's name or metropolitan area. 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. 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 (now 10L/28R) 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 (dubbed "The Terminal for Tomorrow"), 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
(1987) 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 (now called Terminal5); 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. 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 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 (9C/27C) began in 2016. Its completion in 2020, along with an extension of runway 9R/27L completed in 2021, concluded the OMP.
Expansion In 2018, the city and airlines committed to PhaseI of a new Terminal Area Plan dubbed '''O'Hare 21
. The plan calls for two all-new satellite concourses to the southwest of Concourse C, and to expand Terminals 2 and 5 with additional gates, lounges, and updates to operations all over the airport. (Terminal 5 has ten new gates in addition to its newly expanded facilities, plus two additional gates to each accommodate an Airbus A380.) The expansion will enable same-terminal transfers between international and domestic flights, faster connections, improved facilities and technology for TSA and customs inspections and much larger landside amenities such as shopping and restaurants. A principal feature of the plan is the reorganization of the terminal core into an "alliance hub," the first in North America; airside connections and layout will be optimized around airline alliances. This will be made possible by the construction of the O'Hare Global Terminal (OGT)''' where Terminal2 currently stands. The OGT and two new satellite concourses will allow for expansion for both American's and United's international operations as well as easy interchange with their respective
Oneworld (American) and
Star Alliance (United) partner carriers, eliminating the need to transfer to Terminal 5. The project will add over to the airport's terminals, add a new
customs processing center in the OGT, reconstruct gates and concourses (new concourses will be a minimum of wide), increase the gate count from 185 to 235, and provide 25% more ramp space at every gate throughout the airport to accommodate larger aircraft. After an international design competition that featured public voting on five final architectural proposals, the Studio ORD group, led by architect
Jeanne Gang (in collaboration with SCB,
Corgan, Milhouse, and STL Architect), was selected to design the OGT, while
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP will design Satellites1 and2. By terms of the agreement, total costs of $8.5 billion for the project are to be borne by bonds issued by the city, which will be retired by airport usage fees paid by airlines. O'Hare 21 is scheduled for completion of the two satellite terminals in 2028, and overall completion in 2030. By November 2023, the project's cost had ballooned far over budget, leading both American Airlines and United Airlines to call for the global terminal project to be cancelled or scaled back. On May 3, 2024, American Airlines and United Airlines were able to reach an agreement with the City of Chicago to allow the project to continue. In the agreement, the replacement of Terminal 2 would be accelerated, while the addition of Satellite 2 concourse would be delayed. The replacement of Terminal 2 with the OGT was deemed more critical to complete first instead of the Satellite 2 concourse. The design of Satellite 1 concourse was presented to the public on May 29, 2024, it was planned to complete Satellite 1 concourse by 2028. ==Facilities==