www.airlinepilotforums.com/endeavor-air/[/QUOTE]

he got the holy grail that is flow so not sure what he's still griping about.

he got the holy grail that is flow so not sure what he's still griping about.[/QUOTE]
He turned it down.

He turned it down.[/QUOTE]

I'd be ****ed about my choices, too, I guess then.

As someone living in ORD (disclaimer, not a DL pilot, just a DL loyalist passenger who lurks here) this is an excellent consideration and truth be told, you may not know all the answers yet yourself depending on where you are at in life.

Specifically, how do you foresee your lifestyle in the future compared to what it is today? For many people I have known, getting married and having kids is the watershed moment for them in this city. It often means trading your 1 or 2 bedroom in Lincoln Park, Wrigleyville or West Loop for a house in the suburbs and their public school system. Your alternatives are to spend a small fortune on private schools (or send your kids to a Chicago public school...I'll just let that one lie). I live in the city proper and there is virtually no one in my building with school age children.

If the above does not apply to your situation, you'll still have the commuting aspect to consider. I'll let the experts weigh in on that...but ORD generally has a decent amount of mainline lift to the hubs. RJs creep in to some of the markets during the slower months (like now). The schedule has been really drawn down the past few months while they constrain capacity to keep fares up (5x ORDATL - oy vey) which makes timing less convenient. DL recently moved to T5 from T2. The DL gates and new Sky Club are nice. The rest of T5 is a bit of a 1990s time warp, it's a pain to get to from the CTA and it's on an island from the rest of the terminal complex (last minute change of flights to another carrier is not convenient and it's not connected airside). DTW would be the only base that is driveable and requires taking Chicago traffic into consideration depending on where you're starting from.

FYI:

Terminal Transfer Bus (TTB)​ allows connection between Terminals 1 and 5 and from Terminal 3 and 5 (boarding pass required). It means, passengers connecting to a flight at gates M1-M40 in T5 can avoid existing and re-entering security. During the night, TTB is not working, so passengers will need to exit security and board the Airport Transit System (ATS), then be rescreened at a TSA checkpoint.
Frequency: every 15 minutes.
Hours: 11.30 am - 9.30 pm daily
Bus stops: T1 (Gate B1) - T3 (Gate G17 - Gate K20), T5 (Gate M13)

Fly-ORD.com Terminal Connections

Yes. It's at "Gate" M13 which is a doorway right by the sign for the Delta Sky Club. They insist on a boarding pass (or presumably employee credentials). One time last year the ATS was down for hours during the peak period of international arrivals on a Sunday afternoon which turned T5 into a Survivor episode. Knowing this while still airside, I attempted to persuade the attendant to let me on the bus anyway (get airside to T1/T2/T3 to then go landside) and they refused. I almost booked a refundable flight on UA then and there, but in the end just gave up. You can walk to Rosemont in about 30 minutes (CPD officer monitoring the chaos outside advised me to just do that when I suggested it asking for his opinion), but any port in a storm.

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/loca...nsion/3120341/

The ATS is far more reliable than it used to be but it's no ATL Plane Train. Headway can be 15 minutes in the deep overnight hours. And like most things Chicago, when things do go wrong, they go wrong in spectacular fashion.

Im finishing up my first year of commuting now. Apply to UA/AA and if you're in your first six months at DL, I would say don't even think twice about switching. It's just a pain that you don't want to deal with if you don't have to.

Oh, ok I had no first-hand knowledge of that, just had it saved in my memory banks if I had a trip end there with a deadhead and I needed to switch terminals to catch an offline commute home.

Once as a crew we had an early morning departure and were staying in the airport Hilton. We all met about an hour prior to departure to take the train to the M gates. Turns out we barely caught a train at the station and the announcement said the next train would be in 30 minutes 😳. Needless to say had we missed that train our flight would have been late departing.

Yep, I have missed that train coming in from the CTA many times. Nothing like coming down the escalator to the platform to see it pulling away. This morning I lucked out--I got to the platform just in time to hear the "next train in 3 minutes" announcement.

I commuted from MSP-ORD for roughly 3 years. There were a good number of flights between the two cities but there were a ton of commuters!