The biggest city-run project in Chicago history, the $1.6 billion expansion of O`Hare International Airport, is ready for takeoff in 1987, the peak construction year of the 10-year project.
Later this year the new United Airlines terminal will be opened. The glassy building is destined to be the showcase of the airport, even though its $400 million price tag represents only one-fourth of the total cost of the O`Hare expansion, which started in 1982.
The terminal will be longer than the Sears Tower is high and will contain enough glass to build domes over both Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field, which isn`t so surprising when you consider that the architect is Helmut Jahn, designer of the State of Illinois Center.
The finishing touches on the United building represent only a part of the $439 million that will be spent on O`Hare projects in 1987. Some of the rest will be spent on the first stages of the long-delayed and snafu-plagued
”people mover” automated transit system, which should open about 1990.
The city also began looking for architects for the new international terminal this year, though officials still are not sure how that project will be financed.
Much of the rest of the money is going toward important, but unexciting, projects that travelers seldom notice–and often couldn`t see if they tried. The airlines, which are paying for the entire project, so far have spent $480 million, much of it on items like underground fuel pipes for airplanes, new taxiways, a maintenance building, new air cargo facilities and a heating and air-conditioning plant that`s said to be one of the largest in the world–and has to be to cool the United terminal.
”By the end of 1987, the traveling public will truly be able not only to see but to realize the benefits of the O`Hare expansion,” said city Public Works Commissioner Paul Karas, who`s in charge of much of the construction.
The United building is the first terminal you see when you drive around the airport loop. It resembles two long, parallel greenhouses, one abutting the roadway, the other out on the tarmac. They`re connected by an 815-foot underground passage with a moving sidewalk.
The closer greenhouse is scheduled to open in mid-June, but for the first three months it will be used only as a concourse. Passengers will buy their tickets and check their bags at United`s existing terminal, and some of them will walk to the new terminal to board their planes.
In August, United plans to turn its old terminal over to other airlines and open the rest of its new terminal, complete with ticket agents, baggage check-in, skycaps, restaurants and stores. Actually, the terminal that opens in August will be only two-thirds complete. Over the next 12 months or so, the southern ends of the two buildings will be extended to the existing terminal on the south, but workers first have to demolish an old concourse to make way. The new terminal will have 14 gates in the main curbside building and 28 in the satellite for a total of 42, just one more than United has in the old section of the airport. But more of the new gates will accommodate wide-body airplanes, and the terminal generally will be more efficient than the old one. With 56 flow-through ticketing positions in the curbside building, passengers will be able to go straight to their planes. A high-tech underground baggage area, as big as six football fields, will be able to process 480 suitcases a minute.
”We`re not looking at `Star Wars,` ” said United spokesman Tom Germuska, ”but we are at the leading edge of technology for aviation.”
Though United`s terminal differs dramatically from the airport`s existing ”international style” buildings, United didn`t build it just to give the city another architectural monument. It was a hard-nosed business decision arising out of the competitive pressures spawned by the deregulation of the airline industry in the late 1970s.
O`Hare was designed and built during the late 1950s when a DC-8 was as big as planes got, and air travel was, for many people, more a luxury than a necessity. Since airlines were assigned their routes by the federal government, they had little incentive to pay to expand the airport to accommodate the jumbo jets and increased travel demands of the 1970s and 1980s.
Even after they were deregulated and allowed to fly pretty much wherever they wanted, the big airlines were slow to respond with any improvements at O`Hare.
Former Mayor Jane Byrne prodded them into action shortly after she took office in 1979 by persuading Delta Air Lines, a relatively minor carrier at O`Hare, to build a new terminal that opened in 1984 at the opposite end from United.
United, alarmed at the possibility of losing a market share to Delta, soon announced plans for its own terminal. That prompted American Airlines, O`Hare`s second largest carrier behind United, to get going on a $238 million terminal next to Delta`s.
The American terminal, scheduled for completion late next year, is an expansion of the airline`s existing terminal, not a separate building like United`s. It will increase the number of American gates from 16 to 27 and offer high-tech baggage processing and check-in services similar to United`s. Delta, ironically, has reduced operations at O`Hare since building its terminal. It is renting many of its gates to other airlines, including foreign ones, and has made the Cincinnati airport the Midwest hub for its connecting flights.
But Delta accomplished the city`s purpose by acting as a catalyst for the expansion. In addition to the new Delta, United and American terminals, other airport expansion work includes millions of dollars of common improvements financed jointly by all the airlines.
The key element involved moving the taxiways outward from the terminal buildings to make room for the new terminals and extensions of existing concourses. The expansion will increase the number of airplane gates to 143 from 102, allowing the annual number of flights to rise to 900,000 from the current 750,000 by 1995. Any more flights will require an additional runway, a subject that causes apoplexy among noise-weary residents of surrounding suburbs.
The worst thing about O`Hare, said Joseph Schofer, research director of Northwestern University`s Transportation Center, is the way it funnels all ground transportation into a single loop. ”It`s as if they tried to find the most disadvantageous way of handling traffic,” he said.
Traffic congestion will be worse than ever this year, with lanes shut down until the end of the year for a roadway widening project. Airport officials have tried, without notable success, to get people to avoid the traffic loop by turning into the parking lots–or by taking the Chicago Transit Authority`s lightly used rapid-transit line.
O`Hare will still have the single traffic loop after the expansion project is completed, but officials hope some motorists will avoid it in favor of a proposed 11,000-space parking lot in the northeastern part of the airport that will be connected to the terminals by the ”people mover.” A new exit from the Northwest Tollway at Lee Street would feed traffic from the northwest suburbs into the new parking lot–assuming the city and Illinois State Toll Highway Authority can agree on a way to split the cost of the new ramps.
But what O`Hare really needs, say Schofer and others, is an access route from the west for residents of the mushrooming Du Page County suburbs that barely existed when the airport was first designed. These people now have to drive around the airport and get on the single access road leading out from downtown Chicago.
Planners would like to build a remote parking lot on the western edge of the airport and connect it to the terminals with another ”people mover.” But first they have to find somebody to pay the estimated $150 million cost, and the airlines aren`t interested.
As O`Hare grows, it is increasingly dominated by two airlines: United, with about 40 percent of the traffic, and American, with about 25 percent. This is a common phenomenon at inland airports throughout the nation, as deregulated airlines choose certain cities as their hubs. United has another hub at Denver; American at Dallas. Atlanta is dominated by Delta, St. Louis by Trans World Airlines and Minneapolis by Northwest Airlines.
The goal of each airline is to keep connecting passengers from switching to another airline when they reach the hub airport. When United flies a businessman from Sioux Falls, S.D., to Cleveland via O`Hare, it doesn`t want him hopping on an American plane for the O`Hare-Cleveland leg of his journey. The new terminal makes it easy for him to stay on United. The connecting flight will be only a short walk from his gate, and the terminal is so self-contained that he`ll see little or no evidence of other airlines. If he wanted to take an American plane, he`d have to walk almost a mile to get to its terminal.
Come 1990, he could take the ”people mover” from United to American, but it won`t be a particularly convenient trip. He`ll have to leave the terminal through the front door, climb a stairway, cross a bridge over six lanes of automobile traffic, descend the stairway, get on the ”people mover” and repeat the process in reverse at his destination.
This inconvenience doesn`t bother the airlines, which weren`t interested in moving people from airline to airline, anyway. But the ”people mover,” a 3.2-mile elevated train that runs on rubber tires, is expected to do a better job of moving people to the terminals from parking and rental-car lots, reducing the number of cars and buses jockeying for position in front of the terminals.
