It’s a day ending in “y” so nobody should be surprised that United CEO Scott Kirby is making news once again. This time, he’s talking about how American de-hubbing O’Hare would actually be great news for the people of Chicagoland. It may sound crazy, but he’s right… as long as you count “great news” to mean more destinations and nothing else. Even in this universe, however, it’s not realistic. Welcome to the latest installment of Beyond ORD Gates.
Scott has been beating a drum for years that American will be forced to de-hub Chicago, because it is losing so much money there. As of now, he believes American is losing about $1.1 billion a year in Chicago, and that’s likely to grow. Frankly, that is neither here nor there unless you’re an American shareholder looking for near-term gain.
The reality for American is that it has already lost New York, it is losing ground in Los Angeles, and it screwed up Chicago too. American used to take more local passengers and do better in Chicago than United, but after COVID, United made bold moves while American sat there. American can’t really become number one in any of these markets again, not with the way Delta and United are pouring in capacity and taking corporate share. But in Chicago, it can at least be a solid number two — well, excluding Midway, depending how you count it, at least.
These big three markets may not have mattered as much in the past, but now they not only support a lot of capacity but they also generate huge money in terms of loyalty and credit cards. American does now need to be big in these market if it wants to compete with Delta and United, but perhaps even more important is that American and every other airline in the US has a vested interest in not letting United dominate Chicago. That would give United the one thing that it wants that American and Delta alone have in Dallas/Fort Worth and Atlanta respectively… a hub capable of running 1,000 daily departures. I haven’t modeled how much worse off American would be if that happened, but I would hope they have over there at Skyview. It would be bad. And American has been thrown a lifeline to stave that off.
United had beaten American in Chicago with its moves post-pandemic. If the airport’s gate allocation plan went as expected, United would just keep taking more and more and American less and less. But then the feds stepped in. They capped operations this summer at levels that favored American and ignored United’s recent build-up. That meant that United’s whole gate allocation plan broke, and American is back in the game.
So now, Scott is out there spreading the gospel about how American will still have to abandon O’Hare, and he is doing pre-damage control by trying to convince Chicagoans that this is a good thing. He said this at a Crain’s Power Breakfast in Chicago, and it has spread like wildfire:
Network hubs require airlines to feed customers from smaller markets, what the industry refers to as “catchment” flights. But there is a limit to the total number of flights that the airspace around a large airport can accommodate.
You have twice as many catchment flights: There’s twice as many flights to Milwaukee as there would be the equivalent number of flights from, you know, at Atlanta to Charlotte um or Atlanta to Raleigh Durham. So that constrained resource of the number of flights [that can flow through the airspace around O’Hare] is being used to fly twice as many flights to those local markets that don’t really drive the local Chicago economy.
Got it? Basically, Delta and American have their massive home-base hubs that can be a gateway to the world. They can cram through more seats on fewer flights from feeder cities, and then they can support a whole lot more flights to new destinations with that increased level of feed. United and American are both over-serving every feed market from Chicago — since they are in closed systems that don’t feed each other — so there isn’t enough room to optimize and grow new markets. A lot is being wasted on competitive positioning.
In general, this is true. And we can see it in the data.
July 2026 Average Daily Departures to Destination by MSA Size at the Hub
Data via Cirium
What I did is look at the average daily departures by destination within the population bands by MSA served by the airport. And what it shows is that combined, American and United do indeed have more daily flights from Chicago than the others do at their own single-hub airports. This isn’t a surprise. But individually, they are much smaller.
Scott mentions Milwaukee, and that’s a great and easy example to use. Here are all flights from Milwaukee to Chicago/O’Hare from both airlines on Monday, July 12, 2026 as an example:
Just look at all that overlap. It’s completely unnecessary except for competitive positioning. The passenger numbers aren’t there, and that’s why there are six flights on 50-seaters, five flights on 65-seaters, and three flights on 76-seaters. That’s it.
Now what Scott is saying here is that if American disappears, United wouldn’t need to replace all those flights. It could not replace them or it could upgauge if needed. But that frees up a lot of airport runway and gate capacity, so United could grow by feeding more spokes with more flights on bigger airplanes.
The people of Milwaukee wouldn’t suffer, because they aren’t flying to Chicago anyway. They’re flying through Chicago. They could still fly American, but they would just have to fly through a different hub. And the people of Chicago would be happy, because they would get some flight further afield where they actually want to go in exchange for losing a flight to Milwaukee that they would never take anyway.
With all that extra capacity, O’Hare might see about 250 fewer daily flights, but United would have 1,000 of them and it would be able to build a more formidable hub. It could bring more people into Chicago, generating more demand for outbound flights to all sorts of new and fun destinations. This is what Scott is talking about when he says the area would benefit.
The problem, of course, is not in Milwaukee. It’s in those cities where Chicagoans actually go. Would Chicagoans be better off if they could only fly United to Orlando? It would probably be more expensive. Or would some other airline just backfill? What about a smaller city like, say, Pittsburgh? There are more than 300 daily passengers each way flying between those cities as their origin and destination. Would they be better off if American was gone? It’s hard to imagine that.
As is the case with most things, this would be a trade-off. Chicago would stand to benefit by gaining new routes to new destinations with that . If you can tune the hub to run that way, it’s an impressive thing. But this all seems like a discussion that’s for naught. Yes, it may make sense financially to walk away in a vacuum, but there is a whole lot more to consider. And American leaving Chicago just seems impossible.
This is why I think Scott’s best hope is that a future management team at American will talk more about that merger he wants to push. To be clear, I don’t think that’s in any way likely, but now that the O’Hare gate plan has been blown up by the feds, it’s United’s best hope.
