O'Hare Airport's grandiose expansion plans are likely to suffer from huge cost overruns, negligible improvements in flights delays, and worsened ground safety due to poorly-conceived design.

The Chicago region - where I reported and worked on aviation issues for 10 years before moving to Seattle in 1994 - will need additional commercial airfield capacity sooner rather than later. And yesterday's tragic runway overrun by a Southwest Airlines 737 which which horrified neighbors of postage-stamp sized Midway Airport, showed once more that it's certainly not the O'Hare-alternative piece of metro Chicago's aviation future.

No, that would be the long-envisioned but still-not-built Peotone airport well south of the city, designed to have ample buffers, but within good drive-time for a substantial user base in the city's southern and southwest suburbs, and Northwest Indiana. The project is a remarkable testament to politics and persistence. First envisioned 20 years ago, subject to innumerable studies, it has long threatened the Chicago Democratic Machine's notion it should control all commercial airports and airport-related contracts in the metropolitan region. Yet, it has made incremental progress, and has stronger support from suburban Democrats than ever before, who have joined with the usual suburban Republican supects to keep the project alive.

U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. has taken on the scandal-plagued Daley II machine to push for Peotone. The facility would be called Abraham Lincoln National Airport, which has a nice ring. The state has purchased more than 1,800 acres; that's more than twice the size of Midway, and the initial site would have just one runway. Planners should secure even more land for future expansion after the planned O'Hare expansion begins to unravel, as it surely will.

Now, more than ever: Peotone.

TECHNORATI TAGS: MIDWAY AIRPORT, RUNWAY OVERRUN, SOUTHWEST AIRLINES, O'HARE, PEOTONE, NEW AIRPORT, CHICAGO

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at December 9, 2005 06:55 PM