Posted on: Sunday, August 8, 2004
Airport in Gary, Ind., aiming to be remedy for O'Hare logjam
By Denbbie Howlett
USA Today
GARY, Ind. — Easing the nation's air traffic congestion might start here, at a little-known airport with 16 scheduled departures a week, five of them on Hooters Air.
"We are the future," Paul Karas, administrator of the Gary/Chicago airport, boasts. "This region needs capacity, and we're ready to deliver it."
Karas intends to transform his sleepy airfield amid the casino boats and steel mills on the south end of Lake Michigan into a third major airport for Chicago.
That ambitious plan, however, could be stymied by a 15-year political battle to build an airport from scratch near Peotone, Ill., and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's more recent efforts to expand O'Hare International Airport.
"It's a fascinating little competition going on here," says Joseph Schwieterman, an aviation expert at DePaul University.
The need for a third airport in Chicago is clear. Chronic delays at O'Hare have turned the busiest hub in the nation's air traffic network into the system's gnarliest choke-point. O'Hare is on pace for a record 975,000 takeoffs and landings this year. The runways are so overloaded that the Department of Transportation has asked airlines to cut scheduled flights by 7 percent.
The project to expand O'Hare is awaiting Federal Aviation Administration approval. It would cost at least $15 billion and take 10 years to complete.
Chicago's Midway airport is operating at capacity, too, with 175,000 takeoffs and landings a year. An expansion two years ago stretched that airport, a mile-square island inside the city, to its limits.
Last month, the Department of Transportation ranked Chicago among five cities with a critical need to significantly expand flight capacity by 2013.
Without another airport, it's unlikely Chicago would be able to meet the demand. "There has to be some kind of third airport," says Tony Molinaro, a spokesman for the FAA's Great Lakes regional office. But the FAA is not advocating one over another. Nor is it opposed to the expansion of O'Hare.
In Gary, Karas is starting small. The four-member board that oversees the airport, all of them appointed by Gary Mayor Scott King, has given Karas free rein to develop an area that is one of the most economically depressed parts of metropolitan Chicago.
Using what he calls a "fun and sun" strategy, Karas plans to build the airport one piece at a time, on the wings of ultra-low-cost carriers that target leisure travelers headed to vacation spots.
Southeast Airlines, a subsidiary of Delta Air Lines, began flying five times a week in April from Gary to secondary airports in Orlando and Tampa. It has since increased departures to 11. In June, fledgling Hooters Air began service to Myrtle Beach, S.C., and now flies five times a week from Gary. Seats start at $69 and $79 each way. Both carriers say planes are 90 percent full.
"(Gary) gives us access to the major Chicago market with bottom-line cost savings," Hooters Air President Mark Peterson says.
Gary welcomes as many carriers as it can get, but Karas is most eager to attract the ultra-
low-cost and low-cost carriers — especially those such as JetBlue and the proposed Virgin America — that lack a foothold in Chicago. Officials at Virgin and JetBlue declined to comment.
Carriers are drawn to the smaller airports because they're cheaper to use, Karas says. Fees are lower, and less congestion means less fuel burned while taxiing, circling or waiting for gates to open.
