Would have liked to see...those planes are YUGE

The Lufthansa 7478's come in and depart the next day with cargo. Lufthansa is operating several MD11 and 777F freighters daily to Frankfurt Germany also. Frankfurt is the hot route between Chicago right now for cargo. Not sure if Abbott has anything to do with it, but they are full of Pharma supplies and parts.

Hainan Airlines have been doing 7879 flights from the heart of China to ORD several times a week starting last week with cargo only. Saw the old copper colored Panda 7879 here today without Panda stickers.

The AN124 flights I heard came into RFD last week. They also came into ORD last December and I am sure will be back to pick up some oversized cargo again very soon.

Someone took this video of the El Al 7879 landing at ORD yesterday on its weekly cargo flight. We would have passenger flights to Israel if the virus had not ruined summer 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwXd...7VMOmCUHY2yQCM

Yes, you have wait for next few months. They will be on inaugural flight. If the coronavirus crisis improves. They will get better soon.

https://outline.com/bdhxMH

Saw Crystal Luxury Air was at ORD this morning on some secret flight. This has to be the most expensive to fly on airline in the world. They flew their 777-200 into Chicago yesterday and departed around 1pm today. Also Condor Airlines wich is now bankrupt has started flying cargo only flights with their passenger 767-300 airliners. Saw 3 Emirates 777-300's, 2 Cathay Pacific 777-300's, two Jal 777-300's, Lufthansa 748 and a TAP A330 sitting at T5 waiting for cargo only together today. I think one of the Emirates aircraft was for the special flights with passengers to Dubai.

Strange world, and that was just today at T5. South and Northeast Cargo is another world.

Somewhat interesting statistic. Because of the Coronavirus impact to trade from Asia and the influx of medical supplies, O'Hare has surpassed the Port of Los Angeles and Port Laredo to become the largest import-export gateway in the United States, in terms of value.


http://kngkyle.com/uploads/125729.png

Not surprising and this should continue for atleast a few more months at ORD I think. LA will end up 2nd or 3rd with Loredo 1st due to the trade war with China, wich will only get worse in the coming months.

I was in River Park today for a picnic with my kids, and keeping my eyes skyward in hopes of catching a glimpse of the blue angels.

But then I saw something even cooler, a giant An-124 coming in for a landing at ORD flying due west over Argyle.

I don't know who (or why) is flying that rare beast into O'Hare, but it was definitely cool to see!

The An-124 isn't actually all that rare, with 26 in service. The An-225 on the other hand... that guy is one of a kind. Largest and heaviest airplane ever flown. I don't think it's ever been to O'Hare.

http://kngkyle.com/uploads/222337.png

I meant rare for O'Hare.

In my 44 years of life, I've never seen an An-124 in the skies over chicago.

Good news for anyone who rides the Blue Line to O'Hare, the connecting tunnels linking T1/T2/T3 to the Blue Line station under the parking garage will be renovated. Which is good, too, because right now they feel like the sub-basement of a Soviet office building... This design is a little try-hard but certainly an improvement over what's there now. I assume they are meant to coordinate with Jeanne Gang's T2 design.

https://i.imgur.com/I2SgxMe.jpg

That is great news. Those tunnels are in pretty bad shape. I wish they'd also do a deep clean of the CTA station there while they're at it.

Sounds like they're still committed to building T2 the way it is :cheers:

https://studiogang.com/img/OFpHajR4c...ure-oculus.jpg

https://studiogang.com/img/aUZlcDZXO...ure-aerial.jpg

https://studiogang.com/project/ohare-global-terminal

Emirates has been flying passengers already from ORD for several weeks. They will restart semi scheduled flights from O'Hare later this month. This is the only city they will fly from in the USA.

https://airwaysmag.com/airlines/emir...-destinations/

Yeah, I remember that. I was there before. I took on Blue Line to Clark/Lake station. Where my brother wait for me. I remember when I flew to ORD in 2011. I have go see him for a few days.

Yes, it's time to change. They will renovated it soon.

I'm guessing Chicago is the only US destination because of the amount of freight that is in demand to come into Chicago now. The passengers "on top" are literally icing on the freight that is below.

Does anyone have photos or videos of what the current pedestrian tunnels from T1-T2-T3 to the Blue Line look like?

Yes, they have it.

• Video Link

Illinois Tollway and Railroads have agreement paving way for Western Access
 

I don't see any moving walkways... is the intention to eliminate them?

They will eliminate them. No longer moving walkways. You can take a short walk. It's not too far away from there.

I’m sort of surprised this isn’t part of the Ohare21 project. But these hallways do need to be updated.

O’Hare has been removing sidewalks from the T1 concourses for years. But for those over 60, with kids, or with medical conditions, these arn’t that short. Look at any newer or updated airports and terminals around the world and you will notice they all have moving sidewalks (Singapore, HKG, PVG, Beijing(s), Delhi, FRA, LHR, SFO, etc.). Is it space (they are there now), or cost? It’s usually cost. The O’Hare21 project doesn’t even have a train from T2 to the new satellites. Imagine no trains at Denver or Atlanta? Imagine connecting from a remote gate in the 2nd new satellite in the future to B17? Ugly.

I don't think the tunnels in the rendering ever had moving walkways... the big central tunnel (the one with all the flags) has the moving walkways but that one is not pictured. I don't think it's included in the scope of this renovation, only the smaller ones that connect to each terminal.

More info here:
https://www.epsteinglobal.com/whats-...strian-tunnels

This is a huge let down and yet another "small thinking" proposal. You'll essentially have a few hundred feet of a modern tunnel in between an outdated terminal and an outdated central tunnel on the way to an outdated CTA station.

:shrug:

^ If you read the link, the main purpose of the project is to install dampproofing so the tunnels don't leak. The new interior design is just a bonus, since all the original finishes need to be ripped out anyway.

The central part by the Blue Line station is actually the basement of the parking garage, not a tunnel per se, so it doesn't need that same dampproofing.

Never knew about RJD 5 mile lake plan...I'd like to if others have info on it.


https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/ne...rbs-of-chicago


New push for 3rd airport in south suburbs of Chicago


By Mike Flannery


Whether it was Richard J. Daley's proposal in 1970 to build a giant, international airport five miles out in the middle of Lake Michigan; or his son's 1990's notion to put it in Lake Calumet; or the most recent plan for south suburban Will County -- a half-century's worth of spending, totaling hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, has so far come to nothing.

Congresswoman Robin Kelly sees a chance to change that.






“With so many Amazon facilities emerging in the Chicago metro area, I am certain that we're gonna need a more accessible airport that isn't on the other side of Chicago,” Kelly said.

Speaking at Monday’s announcement of new Amazon warehouses in the south suburbs, employing one-thousand people, Kelly talked of Peotone becoming an international hub for e-commerce cargo.





“In fact, Amazon Air has purchased a fleet of 100 new cargo planes, about half of which are operational today,” she said.

Also at Monday’s announcement, Gov. JB Pritzker promised to spend more tax dollars on a Peotone airport, but says it will never get off the ground without deep-pocketed corporations such as Amazon.

“We’re trying to bring together the government side, the infrastructure investments that need to be made. And, on the private side, the business that will be necessary for it to be successful,” the governor said.

No comment on this from Amazon, a company notorious for demanding taxpayer subsidies.

Like we have the 100s of millions so spend. WHY!? just improve Rockford and Gary. So much money for little gain. Makes no sense.

Yeah seriously. I get that Gary is in another state, but maybe if we ask nicely Indiana will let us have Lake County? But then we'll have two Lake counties, and that's a problem. What about Greater Kankakee Airport? Kankakee is not much farther than Peotone...

Pretty wild plan... the idea was to build a circular dike in the middle of the lake with a 4 mile diameter. Then the water would be pumped out and runways, terminals, etc built on the dry lakebed. Access would be via the Stevenson Expressway, with a new bridge into the lake starting near McCormick Place.

For comparison, a 4 mile circle would contain the CURRENT size of O'Hare with room to spare, and certainly much larger than the 1970 size of O'Hare.

https://i.imgur.com/3iUpHd7.jpg

Thanks for that info.

What a radical idea. I wonder how it would have looked from the lakefront and how distracting or non it would have been.

Was this planned before O'Hare and replace it or complement it?

I'm sure it was feasible, the lake is pretty shallow in those parts.

Its been done before several times over in a lot of places. Kansai it as good example and many other in Japan. Also Hong Kong INT.






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansai...tional_Airport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_K...tional_Airport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chubu_...tional_Airport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitakyushu_Airport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalian...tional_Airport

Well, as for Gary, I'd rather have my state have the revenue, taxes, etc, than a neighboring state.

Rockford is already a well-known and busy airport, that probably doesn't need to be expanded now.

The location in Peotone (closer to Beecher, actually), makes sense not just for the proximity to industrial corridors in IN, as well as I-80, I-55, I-57, I-294, etc., but there is already a small airport there, and there is plenty of land to expand if needed. The SSA (South Suburban Airport) is nothing new, IDOT and the state have been working on it for years and years and years; you can even seen the latest master plans from 2016 that show a very clearly defined phasing of what may end up being a large national or even international airport:

https://www.southsuburbanairport.com...MP-reports.htm

https://www.southsuburbanairport.com...14-ULT-ALP.pdf

Long story short, having a third major airport is never a bad thing, especially when it's located in or near the one area with the largest growth in our region (Will county). There's a strange phenomenon in the state of Illinois and even the Chicago metro area that growth and expansion is unnecessary, we're fine with what we have, and fuck the future. Even if we weren't in the middle of a plague, there will always be a need to fly, and it will keep growing and growing because people want to travel, good need to move around the world, so....why not?

Strange thing to say when ORD is getting almost completely rebuilt in one of the largest airport expansion projects outside of China.

I'm of the opinion that any tax dollar spent on Peotone would have been better spent on ORD.

My post was about new things, not about renovating something that has been existing for decades and has needed to be upgraded for decades.

^ But the state has limited resources - spending money on a pipe dream airport is NOT spending money on something else. Also, the Peotone location is solidly in the cornfields, so any investment there is a bet toward massive future sprawl - in fact, that's the end goal. Will County leaders WANT a field of vast warehouses as far as the eye can see - which they already have in the west part of the county along I-55.

I'm not anti-growth in any way, but the Peotone airport folks need to explain how their project is even remotely sustainable for the environment, for Illinois' budget, and for addressing the REAL problems that Chicagoland faces (for example, how are low-income folks from the South Side/South suburbs supposed to get to these "good jobs" loading boxes in an Amazon warehouse?)

I disagree. It's true, more is more. If the choice was between getting a free airport in Peotone or getting nothing, better to have the third airport. But one airport with capacity X is worth more than twice as much as two airports with capacity 0.5x. There are network effects to scale and advantages related to connectivity. It's the same reason the revenue from Google search is worth more than 9x Bing search.

For the most part, the people who want an new airport 50 miles from downtown is that they want resources and infrastructure to be spent and built there rather than downtown. And it's a token voting issue for the rest of the state. "I live in Bloomington. If I can fly to Rome by driving 50 miles south of Chicago instead of driving TO Chicago, that would be great!"

Roads, transit, major infrastructure like airports, these should be built in a way that they leverage nearby resources, not diffusing them. Buffalo, for example, has the same population it did in 1950, but it's spread out to 3x the area. It's more costly to maintain that sprawl, there's less benefit to living there and it's more difficult to share amenities, so the people are less prosperous than they could be.

O'hare is a tremendous asset for the region and state. Building an international airport that draws business away from it damages it's value as a connecting hub. And we would lose leverage over the carriers that fly there. No thank you.

It would probably be more cost effective to just better connect O'Hare to the Illinois Amtrak network. Schiphol Airport effectively serves the entire Netherlands due to frequent train connections to everywhere in the country.

I flew into ORD last weekend and noticed an insane amount of construction work going on. Is all of that from the runway work that they are doing or is any of that prep work for the new terminal?

They had worked on the new hardstands for the expanding of T5, they might even be finished by now. I would think the work should have started on T5 though. I haven't been close to ORD for months to see if this is where work is happening.

There also should still be a lot of work on the new 9C/27C runway. I'm not sure when the work will begin on extending runway 9R/27L.

Please go to Chicago Aviation Fans on Facebook and ask for it. They will let you in. They will answer you.

Illinois is not in a financial position to build a 3rd vanity airport, which has always been about enriching Springfield-connected construction firms and clout-heavy south side players. The airlines aren't asking for it, and that includes the cargo carriers, who are quite happy with MEM, CVG, and other regional airports with existing, underutilized infrastructure (CVG especially since DL barely has a presence there any more) and more accommodating, less burdensome regulatory and labor environments. They also have better weather, and cargo operations generate a fraction of the traffic and revenue that passenger carriers do. Cargo operators fly way less frequently than passenger jets (less runway/landing fees), don't have passengers (no revenue from ticketing fees and airport retail, parking, concessions, etc.), and don't require a huge presence in the terminal (no rent/lease revenue from operating gates, lounges, etc.). GYY and RFD are already Chicago's 3rd/4th airports.

EDIT: Additionally, RFD is already a major hub for UPS, and Amazon Air already utilizes the airport.

I feel like there are faster and easier ways to throw your buddies a few million dollars in construction contracts than spending 20+ years trying to build an airport....

Having worked with a couple of airports in Cali on nagging cargo contracts, I can sort of see where they're coming from. Rockford is a fine airport for bringing deliveries into the Chicagoland area, but it's on the opposite side of the city a lot of the of the intermodal yards and industrial land in the Southern Chicago/Gary IN area. With modern JIT manufacturing you want to schedule deliveries down to the hour or even the minute in some cases, driving 80+ miles isn't going to cut it . What you want is something within ~25-50 miles, which if done right can entourage all sorts of high tech, high value manufacturing to locate in the region.

Here in Cali it's a development plan that Ontario, San Bernadino, Victorville, San Diego (at Brown Field), and Sacramento (at Mather) have all followed. But there's two really big issues I see with Chicago trying to copy them.

First, we've had a spotty record with this in Cali. It's really worked well for Ontario, with UPS's western air hub driving it into one of the top cargo airports in the nation. San Bernadino has struggled for years but recently saw a major success in snagging Amazon's western air hub. Mather is a minor UPS hub for Northern CA and the Central Valley. Brown Field has a development plan in place that's been stalled for years, and Victorville has gone nowhere in that direction.

Second, and more importantly, California didn't pay to build any of these airports. I just want to emphasize this, literally every single one of airports I mentioned is a former military base. Back in the Cold War the USAF in particular built many heavy bomber bases in Cali to strike at the Soviet far east and China, often multiple in the same metro just in case one was nuked. With the Cold War over and all these former bases back in civilian hands, it's mostly been a process of figuring out what to do with them. For the life of me I don't get why Illinois wants so badly to replicate a desperate military town trying to pivot post-BRAC.

Further note on Gary's airport: it's a good location for exactly this sort of plan but the runway is a little short. Its the exact same issue we're facing at Brown in San Diego, which itself probably wouldn't pencil out if it weren't right across the border from Mexico to give the area access to that stupendously cheap labor market. There's also the access to the larger Tijuana airport, and the the Navy's preference for supporting manufacturing in San Diego (its primary west coast homeport) combined with its congressional mandate to locate its supply chain entirely within US borders. All that combines to make up for Brown having an 8,000' foot runway, when really what you need is ~10,000' feet to make for an effective cargo hub. Or maybe not, considering San Diego has been struggling to make this work for 15+ years...

Well, Gary was able to reroute some railroad tracks and extend its main runway from 7,000' to 9,000' several years ago, but thanks to the location of those tracks on one end, and the Grand Calumet River on the other end, that's as long as that runway will ever likely get.

8,859' feet to be exact. Long enough for mid-sized domestic cargo but too short for anything international or even domestic heavies. For that you'd want 9,500' feet at an absolute minimum, and the big boys greatly prefer to see a development plan for extending out to 11,500' before making any major investments. Access to limited amounts of domestic cargo can be an asset for local industry, but it's unlikely to change the area's fortunes much. With all the constraints around Gary though, it'd probably be cheaper to build a new airport in Peotone than extend that runway.

But the whole SSA business case is based on if, ands, and maybes tbh. The manufacturing sector in the Chicagoland area has been struggling for years, for reasons entirely unrelated to a lack of efficient air cargo access. The west coast has access to a larger pool of highly educated workers, labor in the gulf coast is cheaper, and both have several deepwater ports for access to seaborne commerce (which is the cheapest and highest volume method of transporting goods). Without changing that more likely than not you're building another MidAmerica Airport like St. Louis. Have a look how well that was going 12 years in:

• Video Link

^ Yeah, but don't worry... our governor is building a light rail extension to MidAmerica Airport that'll finally turn it all around! :koko:

We're going to be arguing about Peotone until about 50 years after teleportation is invented. It's an expensive bad idea and always has been and it should never be built. FIN.

Will County is home to one of, if not, the largest inland port. Distibution is in high demand in this area. At some point the airport will and should be built and Illiana should also be built.

Yuck. CMAP thinks the Illiana is an awful idea, and I think anyone who likes cities would agree. Obviously the financing structure of the last proposal was awful. It would expose the state to a lot of expenses with an incredibly low bang-for-the-buck potential. Spendings bullions to build a giant highway spur in a thinly populated area and hoping for gas stations, Applebees and Dress Barns to pop up around it is something I'd chain myself to a tree to prevent.

But beyond that, it's Illinois paying for infrastructure that largely benefits Indiana. And to the extent it impacts Chicago, it pulls development southwest in a sprawly sort of way.

You don't even need to know much about the Illiana to know what it's like as a project. Metropolitan planners nationwide think it's an awful proposal and truckers, downstate representatives and builders who turn farms into cheap, cul de sac suburbs love it.

The Iliana IS an awful idea, but that and a third airport near Peotone are not mutually exclusive. Not sure how the Iliana made it into my original post about future need for a third Chicago airport outside of Rockford and Gary, just for the record..

T5 Lounge Space
 

When flying through ORD last Sunday, I noticed there is construction that is visible from the outside taking place between M8 and M9. On another site someone thought it was Delta building out a new lounge to be ready for when they move to T5. There was also commentary that British Airways is doing the same between gates M10 and M11. Does anyone know if this is accurate? Does anyone have any of the details?

I was hoping that the Delta lounge would be larger than what they have in T2 being co-located with other Sky Team members. Maybe even a Sky Team lounge. The Air France lounge in T5 is tiny and not up to par for a major airport like ORD. I was surprised that BA was doing the same on the other side. Is there current T5 lounge that small, I didn't think it was? But maybe it is if you aren't comparing it to the Air France lounge... I was also wondering if British Airways would now consider moving to T3 to make transfers easier. I know American was maxed out with space, but with the COVID impact maybe that has changed before the One World carriers all move to T2 in 7 years. American still has unused space next to K20 that once was their int'l first class lounge. Maybe it can become British Airway's first class lounge, and their other premium passengers can use the new Flagship Lounge. When I arrived at K20, the doors were actually open to that space and people were inside looking around.