:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/NE2GK42YX5AXJFKMDJB6KIPVG4.JPG)
If you frequently take American Airlines to New York City, you might have noticed a change for the worse. Whereas Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport used to have a flight to LaGuardia Airport nearly every hour, from early morning to late evening, these days the schedule has some big gaps.
There’s no longer a flight between about 10:30 in the morning and 1:30 in the afternoon, and the last American jet for LaGuardia now typically leaves the gate at 7 p.m., which is bad news for travelers hoping to have dinner at home before leaving for a meeting.
That particular city pairing is just one example of what some bloggers and close watchers of the airline industry now are calling an “unnoticed pullback” from Chicago by American, which increasingly is favoring its hubs in Charlotte, North Carolina; Miami; and Dallas/Fort Worth, even the growth city of Austin, Texas, especially when it comes to international flying.
You can’t fly on American nonstop from Chicago to Tokyo; Tel Aviv, Israel; or Shanghai, and outside of flights to London, where it works with British Airways, the roster of European nonstops on American “metal” from Chicago now pales in comparison with flights offered by United Airlines in its home city. And it pales in terms of what American was offerings before: The number of seats offered each month by American in Chicago is down, says airline industry blog Cranky Flier, some 20% to 25% from its peak, notwithstanding the much-reported boom in air travel.
So what’s going on? American clearly is looking at huge competition in Chicago on many of these routes, limiting its yields. No comparable competition exists at airports such as DFW and Charlotte, and so a pullback makes some business sense. But Chicago’s Department of Aviation has to work to limit these reductions. It is not good for this airport or this city.
For years, Chicago travelers have enjoyed the unique pleasure of being a hub city — at O’Hare and Midway airports — for three of the country’s four largest airlines: United, Southwest and American. That has not always brought travelers reduced fares, since airline ticket pricing is a complex business, but in general, more competition helps consumers. And, of course, all of this choice has afforded the city a rich array of nonstop destinations, not to mention the chance for the tourism industry to seduce some international connecting passengers into stopping over in downtown, not that the city ever has made much effort in that regard. (By contrast, connecting passengers on Turkish Airlines can get a free tour of Istanbul during their layovers, a boon for local merchants who get buses of free-spending customers arriving on their doorsteps.)
Until at least 2030, when the new “global terminal” is scheduled for completion, O’Hare is hampered by a lack of immigration and customs facilities anywhere outside of Terminal 5. We’ve always found that terminal reasonably efficient for arriving international passengers and better than many of its competitors, but the terminal is no longer just for international flights but also for Delta and Southwest domestic flights, among others, making it very crowded and unpleasant this summer. It also has lost some of the old allure of dedicated international excitement with so much space going to more quotidian trips.
More seriously, O’Hare’s arrangement also forces United and American (and some of their codeshare partners) to shuttle empty planes from Terminal 5 to Terminal 1 or 3, where they can meet their departing passengers coming from domestic flights. That process is cumbersome, very expensive and time-consuming: It can take an hour to perform each time, and it has, and clearly does, act as a disincentive to the addition of new international service from American and United.
For example, when United added a flight to Shannon, Ireland, this summer, it picked one of the few cities where travelers could clear U.S. customs and immigration at their city of origin and thus the plane could arrive and leave O’Hare (or go somewhere else) from the same gate. That was no coincidence. The situation at O’Hare has rightly been described as the most backward and outdated process at any airport in the country, and we’re stuck with it for at least seven more years.
Chicago Tribune Opinion
The massive overhaul of O’Hare is of course designed to correct this problem, eventually, as the old Terminal 2 becomes a kind of unifying bridge between United in Terminal 1 and American in Terminal 3, funneling international passengers into grand new facilities. But that idea, and its huge $12.1 billion cost, is predicated on American still having enough international flights from Terminal 3 to make the so-called global terminal the logical solution.
When the plans were first floated during the Rahm Emanuel administration, no one seriously doubted they would. Now it is looking more and more dicey.
We don’t doubt American’s commitment to a lot of future direct service in Chicago, as the airline has said, but this unnoticed pullback business is an issue that the city’s aviation bosses have to look at before 2030, assuming construction goes on time, which could not be said of O’Hare’s notorious Airport Transit System debacle, whose renovation was millions of dollars over budget and behind schedule.
Chicago has been very nice to Delta, offering the one airline without a huge Chicago presence a nicer setup in Terminal 5 and improvements have come to Midway too. But Chicagoans need American’s international reach, and it cannot sit back and watch all those wide-bodied AA planes move to Charlotte or Austin. Not with so much terminal renovation money already committed.
The O’Hare duopoly between United and American might have its drawbacks, but an international United monopoly with only second-tier competition would be much worse.
Join the discussion on Twitter @chitribopinions and on Facebook.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.