The Chicago region needs a third airport. What it doesn’t need is a gleaming glass-and-concrete symbol of poor planning with a terminal as quiet as a library.
Even the most stalwart opponents–albeit under pressure–are now embracing the concept of a third airport.
Mayor Richard Daley’s aviation chief, Thomas Walker, said as much in May. And recently U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin–a Democrat–formally endorsed the Republicans’ idea for the south suburban airport at Peotone–as long as it accompanies O’Hare expansion.
It comes down to simple mathematics: Two new runways would increase O’Hare’s capacity from its current ceiling of 946,000 flights a year to 1.2 million. But the Federal Aviation Administration predicts flights at O’Hare will reach 1.5 million by 2015.
Landlocked Midway Airport offers no hope for growth without wrecking blocks of homes.
“Common sense dictates that we’ll need this additional capacity in the future,” Durbin wrote in a letter last week to the director of the Chicago Southland Third Regional Airport Information Clearinghouse.
Peotone has emerged from a handful of contenders as the most efficient (read cheapest) option.
But it’s not time to start pouring concrete yet.
Illinois should buy the land it needs for the third airport near Peotone, but it should not break ground until it irons out commitments from airlines, because they will ultimately determine whether the concept works or whether it becomes a nice modern building with acres of concrete and no business to speak of.
If an airport never is built, the state can always resell the land, a far easier proposition than unloading a useless airport.
Nine years ago, state officials selected Peotone as the location for a third airport after rejecting four other sites. The state said it was the least expensive site and could draw from a market of 5.5 million people–many of whom live far from O’Hare.
The Peotone choice angered critics who didn’t want to see farmland turned to asphalt and concrete, but it did not present the environmental pitfalls that came with sites like Gary and Lake Calumet.
Airlines complained about the location–45 miles south of the Loop–but Peotone emerged as the state’s choice only after Daley abandoned his Lake Calumet plan.
As momentum builds for proceeding with Peotone, a sobering $313 million lesson in airport planning sits 256 miles to the south.
Plunked down in Illinois farm fields that stretch to the horizon, MidAmerica Airport has a 50,000-square foot terminal, a 10,000-foot runway, four gates and a seven-station ticket counter–all home to a single airline operating a single daily flight.
The state and St. Clair County officials forged ahead with building MidAmerica, 24 miles east of St. Louis, despite any expression of interest from airlines.
“It’s discouraging because you know [MidAmerica] is not going to last,” says Sandy Sharlow, a 48-year-old travel agent booked on PanAm’s 12:50 p.m. flight to Sanford, Fla., via Gary, another of our region’s lonely airports.
State officials say their Peotone plan initially calls for a 4,112-acre airport with a 12,000-foot runway and a terminal with 12 gates. The state estimates the price tag for the starter airport would run about $500 million to $600 million.
But construction should proceed only “if there is a demand for it,” said Robert Poole Jr., director of the transportation center at the Reason Public Policy Institute, a Los Angeles-based conservative think tank. “Otherwise, that’s MidAmerica all over again if they are not careful.”
United and American are on record saying they won’t use Peotone if it is built. In fact, three years ago Southwest Airlines warned it has a clause in its lease at Midway that would allow it to move its operation to either Rockford or Milwaukee if a third airport is built. But the provision expires in 2012, years before Peotone could pose a threat to Southwest or Midway.
There are ways for the state to spur airlines to establish operations at Peotone, said Aaron Gellman, former director of Northwestern University’s Transportation Center.
Airports charge the airlines landing fees, averaging $5 a passenger, to use their runways. Landing fees at O’Hare and Midway could be increased–perhaps substantially–while landing fees at Peotone could be free or well below market rates at the congested airports. Such fees would create a strong economic incentive for the airlines to consider establishing service at Peotone, experts said.
Gellman believes the combination would be enough to get the attention of airline executives. “If the charges are lower, the airlines will follow,” he said.
Elsewhere in the country, the federal government has had success with incentives and restrictions that encourage airlines to use new or underutilized airports.
After Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport was built in the 1970s, only smaller aircraft–those with 50 seats or less–were allowed at the city’s existing airport, Love Field. In Washington, D.C., flights originating more than 1,250 miles from the city were not allowed to land at Reagan National Airport, a restriction that steered transcontinental flights to the newer Dulles International Airport.
Increases in landing fees and caps on the number of flights at London’s Heathrow Airport eventually encouraged low-cost carriers there to use the London area’s newer, third airport, Stansted, located 30 miles northeast of the city. It took more than a decade, but the airport is now bustling.
Though United and American might never move to Peotone, another major carrier might create its own hub there, said Rick Bryant, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., (D-Chicago), a Peotone proponent. In the late 1970s, Continental Airlines created a hub at Newark International Airport, now one of three major airports serving the New York region.
There was a time when the state’s credo for Peotone was, “Build the airport and the airlines will come,” but state officials have backed off that thinking and now believe they must have commitments from airlines first and financing for the project.
A report drafted by state Rep. Julie Hamos (D-Chicago), head of the Illinois House Aviation Committee, recommended spending up to $75 million to acquire land at the Peotone site, with the caveat that construction should not begin without financing and airline commitment.
Another airport built in 1998, the same year MidAmerica opened, offers state officials–and perhaps local business leaders–a better model for planning and building an airport.
Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport was built near an existing airport in Fayetteville, Ark. But the $109 million Bentonville airport thrives because it secured commitments from airlines before starting construction. The commitments came after three major corporations in the region, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and J.B. Transportation, pledged that their employees and executives would become regular passengers.
So far, three airlines, Miramar, Fla.-based Spirit Airlines, Orlando-based AirTran Holdings and London-based Virgin Atlantic have expressed mild interest in serving an airport at Peotone–not enough for the state to proceed. Whether more airlines look to Peotone, and whether that interest can be converted into ironclad commitments, is the key to the proposed airport’s future.
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A TRIBUNE SPECIAL SECTION: SOLUTIONS TO GRIDLOCK
Clearing the air
A blueprint for solving the crisis in U.S. air travel
THE PROPOSALS
Add runways at O’Hare
Plan for 2, build at least 1. Perspective, Page 3
Create an air authority
1 team could marshal strengths of all region’s airports. Perspective, Page 3
Streamline air traffic control
FAA must react faster to change. Perspective, Page 5
Reduce overscheduling
Higher fees may open arteries. Perspective, Page 6
Greenlight Peotone
Yes to 3rd airport if the math works. Perspective, Page 7
Tap the regional airports
Down the road, airfields offer hidden capacity. Perspective, Page 8
