I just went there a couple days ago and waited in the pad for 15 minutes with 5 other aircraft for a gate to open up. I guess our goal is to turn every hub experience into CLT.

 

https://thebulkheadseat.com/chicago-...ors-face-cuts/

 

Have you not been through there the past two weeks? It’s a hot mess, even by ord standards.

 

Lol, so true. CLT and MIA you can get in 20 minutes early and still be 15 minutes late to block in.

 

My comment was regarding previous newsletters going back to last year pointing out the operational challenges the construction projects will present for the alleyways. My takeaway was the alleyways will be more impacted when compared to operations elsewhere on the field. Which I don't think is inaccurate. The waits at the top of the alleys for departures can get somewhat lengthy.

 

I know he's just another travel blogger, but this guy did a lot of reaching out to the city and other airlines as part of the linked article. The long and the short of it seems to be that the "preferential" gate distribution between tenants gets rebalanced in October for usage based upon the prior year (they apparently start looking at it in Feb). So it makes sense why the recent summer schedule increases have been announced at American.

His take: "What DOES matter is that this is all a silly shell game anyway. Remember, the gates don’t change over until October 1, so United will only get to use those six gates for the last three months of the year. But when the process starts all over again next February? It looks at departure share for all of the previous year. That means United will not have the benefit of those six gates for the first nine months of data which skews things greatly. That means it could very well lose again next year even if it is ramping up. And the cycle will continue since the data will never include more than a quarter of a year with the most recent gate allocation."

United Says It Grabs Six More Gates at O’Hare, But It’s Not Entirely Clear – Cranky Flier

 

That podcast is horrid and gets a lot of things wrong.

 

AA took over the Spirit gates (we are already using them) and lost some Air Wisconsin gates. The end result are more of the larger gates for better mainline capacity. Travel bloggers are almost always wrong and look at the date of that podcast, it was produced before AA announced they were expanding service in ORD.

 

Such as?

....

 

As I stated above came out before AA's announcement and that supposed ORD "expert" on that podcast is only an expert cause he lived in Chicago and "flys United a lot". lol, okay. That's one of the worst aviation podcasts out there.