The unbridled growth of American Airlines and United Airlines at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (ORD) is over for now.
Following a rapid run-up in schedules this summer as the airlines fought to preserve gate access, the Federal Aviation Administration called a pause. The regulator, citing schedules that exceed the total daily runway capacity of ORD, said in a Federal Register notice on Tuesday that it plans to cap total daily operations at the airport in order to avoid severe “delays, cancellations, and inconvenience to the traveling public.”
The rub? Getting airlines — primarily American and United, which dominate O’Hare — to reduce schedules to no more than 2,800 daily operations, down from as many as 3,080 operations on peak days this summer.
The situation at ORD was years in the making. Airlines agreed in 2018 to a new way to allocate gates — or “linear frontage” as the agreement puts it — at the airport under a use-it-or-lose-it formula. After a COVID-era suspension, the formula resulted in American losing five gates and United gaining a roughly equal number when the changes took effect in October 2025.
This year, American is expected to gain as many as three gates back — but, speaking in January, United CEO Scott Kirby said the airline was drawing a “line in the sand” on any further gate gains by American.
“We’re not going to allow them to win a single gate at our expense in 2026,” he said. “We’re going to add as many flights as are required to make sure that we keep our gate count the same in Chicago. We’re just going to stay focused.”
Enter the summer 2026 schedules. Immediately following Kirby’s comments, American added three new routes from ORD to places like Lehigh Valley International Airport (ABE) near Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Columbia Metropolitan Airport (CAE) in South Carolina. United responded days later with its own five-route expansion, plus additional flights on another 80 routes.
“This is not meaningful growth — it is a ploy to overschedule the airport to manipulate a provision which was meant to promote competition, seemingly without regard for ORD customers, team members or partners,” David Seymour, chief operating officer of American, and Nathaniel Pieper, chief commercial officer of American, told staff in a memo Tuesday viewed by TPG.
“United’s reactive overcapacity is meant to undermine ORD’s status as a dual hub,” they added.
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Seymour and Pieper are not wrong. United wants to push American’s hub out of ORD, a fight the carriers have waged since at least the 1980s, when U.S. airlines were establishing hubs. Kirby has repeatedly claimed that, based on United’s internal estimates, American loses a significant amount of money at the airport.
United has even waged a publicity campaign in Chicago to raise its profile with local travelers.
Most industry followers doubt that American would close its ORD hub. The base is simply too important and strategic for the airline to back down. More likely is that American and United will reach some form of renewed detente in the Windy City.
But the overscheduling at ORD this summer prompted the FAA to call a two-day scheduling meeting with airlines in Washington, D.C., led by Administrator Bryan Bedford, that began Tuesday.
How the FAA plans to reduce schedules at ORD is unclear. If done purely on the basis of share percentages, the question is which period to use. In the second quarter of this year, United is scheduled to fly nearly 51% of the flights from ORD, and American just 37%, schedule data from aviation analytics firm Cirium shows. But if one looks at 2025 numbers, United’s share falls to 48%, while American’s holds at nearly 37%.
Tom Fitzgerald, an airline analyst at TD Cowen, wrote on Monday that he expects American and United to remove “regional capacity to optimize gate usage” once the methodology for schedule reductions is agreed upon. Additional reductions could be achieved by consolidating frequencies onto larger planes on routes with multiple daily flights.
Regional reductions and frequency consolidation are what occurred when the FAA capped the number of flights at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) in the summer of 2025.
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