Chicago Aviation: One City. Many Gateways Part 4: From Orchard Place to O’Hare

Originally posted on LinkedIn September 21, 2026

You can’t talk about aviation in Chicago without eventually getting to the giant in the northwest corner of the city: O’Hare International Airport (ORD).

Today, O’Hare is enormous—eight runways, multiple terminals, endless concourses, and tens of millions of passengers moving through every year. But about 80 years ago, there wasn't much there at all.

The area was known as Orchard Place. During World War II, the federal government selected it as the site for a Douglas Aircraft plant to build C-54 military transports. The airfield built alongside the plant was initially called Douglas Airport.

That history explains one of those bits of aviation trivia that doesn't make much sense until you know the story: why the airport code is ORD. It comes straight from Orchard Place. The airport changed names, grew into one of the world's largest aviation hubs, and became synonymous with Chicago, but the old code stuck.

After the war, Douglas left, leaving Chicago with something it badly needed: room to grow.

Chicago Municipal Airport (which we now know as Midway) was hemmed in by surrounding neighborhoods and had no room to expand. Aircraft were getting larger, commercial flying was taking off, and the city needed another airport. The former Douglas site gave them thousands of acres to work with.

In 1949, the airport was renamed O’Hare Field to honor Lt. Cmdr. Edward “Butch” O’Hare, a Navy fighter pilot and Medal of Honor recipient. Commercial service started moving over in the 1950s, and when the jet age arrived, O’Hare blew up, becoming the busiest airport in the world by the early 1960s.

There’s still a great connection between both sides of that history today. The ORD code keeps the Orchard Place name alive, while Butch O’Hare is remembered inside Terminal 2 with a restored Grumman Wildcat hanging on display.

But history isn't really what made O’Hare memorable to me. It was the site of my first flight ever.

It was 2002, and I was connecting through Chicago on a United flight from Lansing to San Antonio. Having never been on an airplane before, stepping into ORD felt like landing on another planet. The sheer size of the place hit me first: people everywhere, planes filling the tarmac, gates stretching farther than I could see, and ramp vehicles darting in every direction under constant overhead announcements.

Because it was right after 9/11, airport security was changing almost by the month. The lines were long, screening was intense, and the whole place had this strange mix of excitement and tension.

Then there was United Channel 9. If you flew United back then, you probably remember it. You could plug your headphones into the armrest and listen directly to the air traffic control frequency. For a first-time flyer, listening to controllers sequence planes into and out of O’Hare while watching it happen outside the window was about as cool as it got.

I remember other small things that seem totally ordinary now. I couldn't believe you could buy Burger King inside an airport, walk over to a giant window, and sit there eating lunch while watching planes taxi by.

Certain things stick with you forever: the roar of the ramp, the hum of the food court, the lighting in the concourses, and that sudden, unmistakable smell of jet fuel drifting inside whenever a door opened to the tarmac. To someone already fascinated by aviation, O’Hare was total sensory overload.

That fascination eventually brought me back for something special on March 20, 2007: the arrival of the Airbus A380.

At the time, the double-deck A380 was something most Americans had only seen in pictures. Airbus was taking it on a demonstration tour, and O’Hare was one of its U.S. stops.

Naturally, aviation people showed up in droves. People lined the airport perimeter along Irving Park Road waiting to see it, and watching that massive airplane come down final against familiar Chicago buildings finally gave you a sense of its incredible scale.

That day highlighted another side of O’Hare that doesn't get talked about enough: it’s an incredible airport for watching airplanes. Over the years, spotters have mapped out all kinds of vantage points around ORD—from gravel pull-offs along Irving Park and York Roads to airport parking garages and the upper floors of the on-field Hilton. From up there, you can watch heavy international arrivals, United and American operations, cargo jets, and departures lined up several deep on the taxiways.

For an aviation enthusiast, there aren't many places quite like O’Hare. But it also proves a key point about traveling through Chicago: bigger isn't always better for every trip.

If you are flying commercially to London, Tokyo, or Frankfurt, O’Hare’s scale and connectivity are hard to beat. But that same scale becomes a bottleneck when a trip is time-sensitive. Your travel day doesn't end when the wheels touch down; there's still the long taxi to the gate, walking through sprawling terminals, waiting for bags, getting ground transport, and then fighting Chicago traffic. Depending on where you actually need to be, O'Hare might not even be the closest airport.

That's what makes the Chicago market so unique. O’Hare is the giant, but it operates alongside a fantastic network of regional airports—like DuPage, Chicago Executive, Midway, and Waukegan—that each serve different parts of the region and different types of travel.

Sometimes O’Hare is the absolute right answer. Sometimes a regional airport is a much smarter move. Knowing the difference is what this whole series is about.

And for a little nostalgia, here’s some wonderfully grainy digital video from the A380’s 2007 arrival at O’Hare. It’s not my video, but it captures the exact feeling of standing around the airport perimeter that day, waiting for that giant airplane to come in.