Apple picking
KORD. So named, for Orchard Field, which in turn was named for Orchard Place, a small farming village northwest of Chicago. In the 1930s traffic was outgrowing Municipal Airport (the airport now known as Midway, MDW) and the city sought a site for a second airport but without any decision. In 1942 Douglas Aircraft needed a site for a manufacturing plant (and accompanying runways) for C-54 aircraft and an open area near Orchard Place had suitable transportation access especially rail links. The then-CAA insisted that the main runway be configured with parallel directional orientation to Municipal's runway, and hence the construction of the first 32-14 runway. (Willow Run airport near Detroit, Michigan, needless to say never reached O'Hare's league - but its legacy likewise is military aircraft manufacturing, and indeed nothing in Chicago O'Hare Int'l Airport can even remotely compete or match with the Second World War bomber plant heritage at Willow Run.)
The lesson, for those wishing not to be consigned to failure by the mistakes or oversights of the past, is that merely moving out of the city, out into open space, is not a long-lasting solution to the airport needs of an evolving aeronautics and air transport sector. This is beyond the mere sad political theater of a mayoral administration in Chicago designating the small, barely capable airport in Gary, Indiana as Chicago's "third airport." Rather, like generals who cliché always assigns to fighting the last war, responsible urban and regional planning officials historically have not had the luxury of looking beyond the necessarily foreseeable future, and thus have not asked (perhaps with rare exceptions), "what if?" But if any of the nascent aeronautics revolutions occurs - SSTs, space tourism, SSTOs, semi-autonomous aircraft - today's airport planning will seem as incredibly weak and ill-informed as, as, . .......as the ridiculous assertion that a major air carrier flight operation could come within the yardage of a couple three first downs of a catastrophic landing atop a row of planes on a taxiway at a major airport. Ah, well, uhhh, wait.