To understand the widespread civic misunderstanding over the ongoing improvement and expansion of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, consider this statistic. As recently as 2018, American Airlines offered hourly “Shuttle” service between its hub at O’Hare and New York’s close-in LaGuardia, Chicago’s most crucial route for business travelers. There were 15 ORD-LGA weekday round-trips on American’s shuttle-branded service. The flights all were on Boeing 737-800 jets.

But if you want to travel on American’s service this coming typical week, you’ll have a choice of just seven weekday American roundtrips on that route (plus one on a commuter affiliate), less than half of what was offered before the pandemic. Many of those flights are on smaller planes. They serve Chicago and a little clutch of Midwest feeder cities. They do not have ambitions much beyond that.

As we’ve noted before, American has been engaging in a quiet pullback from our economically vital airport, one of the very few in the world that can (or could) claim to be a true dual hub of United and American, along with also offering significant competitive service from Delta, Southwest and the ultra-low-cost carrier Spirit.

New routes, of course, get heralded with press releases, but disappearances go quietly. While it’s true some new destinations have been added at ORD, you can no longer fly nonstop from Chicago to Hong Kong, which used to be possible on United. You can’t fly Chicago to Tokyo on American anymore. You can’t fly on anyone’s metal nonstop from Chicago to Shanghai or Beijing. Big losses, all.

United might be Chicago’s hometown airline (for now, anyway), but both Denver and Newark, New Jersey, had more departing seats on United than Chicago during the fourth quarter of 2023; ORD has been dethroned. And American’s expansion in little Charlotte, North Carolina, is a large cause of the devastating AA de-emphasizing of Chicago, which charges the airline roughly six times the fees Charlotte charges when it comes to costs per emplaned passenger (CPE), an industry standard measurement of how much it costs airlines to use an airport.

So we’ve been watching as the city, elected officials like Sen. Dick Durbin and various media analysts and editorializers around town have been opining as to how the airlines must be forced back into line and made to keep to what they promised when Mayor Rahm Emanuel hammered out the 2018 plan.

Here’s Sen. Durbin: “To preserve the Airport’s world-class status, any agreement must include the 25% gate capacity increase that was part of the original 2018 Terminal Area Project agreement, which primarily would come from the addition of a Satellite 2 terminal.” Here’s the Sun-Times Editorial Board: “Chicago must keep pushing forward on O’Hare expansion project.”

Yet United and American have said they don’t currently want Satellite 2, which would be accessed by tunnel and cost billions of dollars. Why? The answer lies in our lead paragraph. They don’t now offer sufficient service to warrant it, and they don’t want to pay for it until they do. Understandably.  And why don’t they offer enough service? They’re for-profit businesses, and it’s become far cheaper to route connecting passengers through Charlotte or Denver.

American and United always are going to serve their big Chicago customer bases — no real worries there — but the Global Gateway was predicated on Chicago remaining a massive national hub connecting passengers from across the nation, not just a few Midwest towns like Green Bay or Kalamazoo. Such connections are cheaper to do elsewhere. Does Sen. Durbin plan to compel United and American to offer unprofitable service?

Here’s Crain’s in 2020: “The terminal expansion would vault O’Hare over competing airports, opening the door to growth and vastly improving the airport experience. Dozens of new gates would reduce delays, give passengers more flight options and spur airline price competition by allowing more carriers to serve the airport.”

What actually would vault O’Hare over competing airports is, in fact, more service, not a terminal expansion. Airlines don’t schedule flights based on fancy fountains. The Crain’s view also rests on the assumption that carriers are knocking down the door to come to O’Hare. That could be reasonably argued in 2020, but we now find Spirit on the ropes, JetBlue struggling, and the likes of Breeze, Allegiant and Frontier all far preferring to serve secondary airports to protect themselves from brutal competition.

Simply put, O’Hare’s best competitive bets are among the majors. If they have enough service to offer and if the city can avoid pricing itself out of the market.

We’d love to see architect Jeanne Gang’s beautiful Global Gateway design become a point of pride, but the debate over O’Hare must face up to realities. The city should build the terminal first and shed the inefficiencies of currently having only one terminal (T5) capable of receiving international flights.

Runways to prevent costly delays were job one, and that’s already done. The terminal replacing the dated, defunct T2 is job two, making the airport more efficient. We should get that done as quickly, elegantly and affordably as possible. The airlines are on board.

The new satellite gates? Far less important. Protect the possibility, but why do we need them unless we know O’Hare will have the service to use them?

Here’s what will best preserve O’Hare’s world-class status, Sen. Durbin: flights to anywhere and everywhere.

That means United and American have to be our clients at O’Hare, unless the city is planning to fly jets even as it operates grocery stores.