The rampant growth of American Airlines and United Airlines at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (ORD) is over for now.
After a rapid increase in schedules this summer as airlines struggled to preserve gate access, the Federal Aviation Administration called a pause. The regulator, citing schedules that exceed ORD’s total daily track capacity, said in a Federal Register warning Tuesday that it plans to limit total daily operations at the airport to avoid serious “delays, cancellations and inconveniences to the traveling public.”
The problem? Get the airlines (mainly American and United, which dominate O’Hare) to reduce their schedules to no more than 2,800 daily operations, down from 3,080 operations on peak days this summer.
The situation at ORD took years to develop. Airlines agreed in 2018 to a new way of assigning gates (or “linear front,” as the agreement says) 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 bring back up to three gates, but in January, United CEO Scott Kirby said the airline was getting a “line in the sand” on any new entry gains by the Americans.
“We are not going to allow them to win a single door at our expense in 2026,” he stated. “We’re going to add as many flights as we need to make sure we keep the same number of gates in Chicago. We’re just going to stay focused.”
Enter summer 2026 schedules. Immediately following Kirby’s comments, American Three new routes were added. 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 their own five route expansionplus additional flights on 80 other routes.
“This is not significant growth – it is a ploy to over-schedule the airport to manipulate a provision intended to promote competition, seemingly without regard for ORD’s customers, team members or partners,” David Seymour, American’s chief operating officer, and Nathaniel Pieper, American’s chief commercial officer, told staff in a memo to staff Tuesday seen by TPG.
“United’s excess reactive capacity is intended to undermine ORD’s status as a dual hub,” they added.
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Seymour and Pieper are not wrong. United wants to move American’s hub out of ORD, a fight airlines have waged at least since the 1980s, when U.S. airlines were establishing hubs. Kirby has repeatedly claimed that, according to United’s internal estimates, American loses a significant amount of money at the airport.
United even launched an advertising campaign in Chicago to raise its profile among local travelers.
Most industry followers doubt American will close its ORD center. The base is simply too important and strategic for the airline to back down. Most likely, American and United will reach some form of renewed détente in the Windy City.
But scheduling overload at ORD this summer led the FAA to convene a two-day scheduling meeting with airlines in Washington, D.C., headed by Administrator Bryan Bedford, that began Tuesday.
It is unclear how the FAA plans to reduce schedules at ORD. If done solely on the basis of share percentages, the question is which period to use. In the second quarter of this year, United plans to fly nearly 51% of flights from ORD, and American only 37%, scheduling data from aviation analytics firm Cirium shows. But if we look at the 2025 figures, United’s share falls to 48%, while American’s remains at almost 37%.
Tom Fitzgerald, an airline analyst at TD Cowen, wrote Monday that he expects American and United to eliminate “regional capacity to optimize gate usage” once the methodology for the schedule reductions is agreed upon. Additional reductions could be achieved by consolidating frequencies on larger aircraft on routes with multiple daily flights.
Regional reductions and frequency consolidation are what happened when the FAA limited the number of flights at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) in the summer of 2025.
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