The recent Tribune series “Gateway to Gridlock” falsely charged that the City of Chicago’s aviation demand forecasts were manipulated for political purposes and, therefore, were a reason behind the delays.
The City of Chicago has never asked us to change or suppress the forecasts or to hide a need for more capacity.
In fact, the demand forecasts developed by Landrum & Brown have stood up against reality, thereby providing a credible basis for financing and implementing necessary improvements over the last four decades. For example, our 1993 forecast predicted slightly fewer than 35 million enplanements at O’Hare in 2000. The actual number will likely be about 36 million.
All of the demand forecasts we developed were heavily scrutinized by the Federal Aviation Administration, the state, other agencies and the public at the time of their release.
If L&B had ever engineered biased forecasts, it would have been nearly impossible for us to stay in business, much less lay claim to a highly successful track record. Over the past 50 years, L&B has developed realistic forecasts and solutions, not only for Chicago but for 45 of the top 50 airports in the U.S., and dozens of major airports overseas.
The series contends that we changed our original forecast in order to challenge a third airport proposal. This is untrue. The different figures cited did not represent changes in the forecast but rather were projections for different periods of time. The aviation industry today is too dynamic to develop reliable, 20-year forecasts for purposes of making investment decisions. As a result, the airlines and financial community routinely place greater value on 10-year or even shorter forecasts.
Although the Tribune stories place much of the blame for delays at O’Hare on a power struggle between local politicians, the reality is that delay is a national issue, created by many factors out of the control of the City of Chicago. Bad weather, airline labor disputes and insufficient investment in the nation’s air-traffic-control systems and staffing contributed in part to many of the flight delays experienced over the past year. Because O’Hare is a major international gateway, the largest mid-continental spoke-airport, and the hub for two major airline alliances, it inevitably experiences the impact of such external problems more heavily than some other airports.
