Chicago Calamities by Gayle Soucek

Author:Gayle Soucek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2012-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES

AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 191

Look, look, he blew an engine off ! Equipment, I need equipment, he blew an engine! Oh, shit…he’s not talkin’ to me…There he goes, there he goes…

–recording of O’Hare air traffic controller to colleagues after his unsuccessful attempt to communicate with the doomed plane

May 25, 1979, was a beautiful spring day in Chicago—sunny and sixty-three degrees, with a brisk twenty-two-knot breeze from the northeast gusting across the tarmac at O’Hare International Airport. At the time, O’Hare was the world’s busiest airport for takeoffs and landings, a distinction it would maintain until federal flight caps imposed in 2004 caused Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta to edge into the top spot. More than 40 million passengers and more than 1 million tons of mail and freight moved through O’Hare in 1979, and by 2005, those numbers had nearly doubled. It remains the nation’s only dual-hub airport, serving as a hub for both United and American Airlines.

The airport sits on a tract of land covering more than seven thousand acres, about seventeen miles northwest of Chicago’s downtown, in what was once a small unincorporated community known as Orchard Place. In the 1940s, the site housed a 2-million-square-foot manufacturing plant for Douglas C-54s used during World War II, and the small airport was known as Orchard Place Airport/Douglas Field. To this day, O’Hare still carries the three-letter FAA airport designator of “ORD.” In 1945, Douglas Aircraft Company consolidated its manufacturing on the West Coast, and the City of Chicago looked to the nearly abandoned airfield as a future jetport that could replace the cramped and small Chicago Midway International Airport.

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