Quote:
Originally Posted by brickell
How are places like ORD and ATL with discount carriers?
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i can only speak about ORD. the two biggies at ORD are obviously United and American who each operate massive hubs at the airport and together control the lion's share of the airport's passenger traffic, but ORD is also a focus airport for both Spirit and Frontier, who each fly to about two dozen cities non-stop from ORD. Jet Blue and Virgin America each have pretty limited service to ORD from a handful of their respective hubs/focus cities. and that's it for domestic LCC's at ORD.
there is no Southwest presence at ORD because Southwest serves the chicago market exclusively through MDW, and they
UTTERLY DOMINATE that aiport.
and unlike metro miami's airports, ORD and MDW don't really serve different sub-markets. they're both located within the city limits of chicago. ORD is ~14 miles NW of the loop and MDW is ~8 miles SW of the loop, and they're both connected to downtown by el lines.
MDW is an old and outdated airport by today's standards (the airfield itself, not the terminals and concourses which were all entirely rebuilt from the ground up in the late '90s/early '00s), and in most other markets, it would have died, much like it nearly did when ORD was built in the '60s. but the airport hung around for a while, unloved and barely used, until it was saved in the knick of time by airline deregulation in the late 70s. first, a chicago LCC start-up called midway airlines set up a hub at the airport, proving that the little airport still had viability. they eventually folded, but not before other LCC's noticed what they were doing and started setting up shop there as well. Southwest first set-up shop there in 1985, and over the decades, through attrition and mergers of other LCC's, southwest came to dominate the airport and is now more or less the only game in town at MDW (except for a handful of other airlines who all have
very limited service to MDW).
so while chicago, like miami, is one of the few american metros with more than one large hub airport, as defined by the FAA (NY and DC/balt. are the other two), it's kind of a different arrangement. chicago just happened to have this little old airport that just kept hanging around until someone was able to really take full advantage of it. today, MDW serves over 22 million passengers a year and is busier than it has ever been in its entire life, even compared against its time in the 1950s when it was the "world's busiest airport". it's probably the greatest airport comeback story of all time.
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