Chicago O'Hare International Airport halted all flights on Tuesday after severe weather triggered an FAA ground stop, then kept a ground delay in place until 10 p.m. The shutdown hit one of the busiest hubs for United Airlines and American Airlines and left travelers facing another day of broken schedules at ORD.
The scale was severe enough to put ORD at the center of U.S. airport flight cancellations search traffic again: delays were averaging 144 minutes, more than 1,500 flights were delayed, and those disruptions affected over half of all flights in and out of the airport. Chicago Midway Airport also had a ground stop on all flights Tuesday, showing the weather snarled traffic across the city, not just at O'Hare.
This was the third day in a row that storms scattered across the Chicago area disrupted operations at O'Hare. Flooding, tornado warnings and toppling trees accompanied the weather, and the airport had the most cancellations of any U.S. airport for the third straight day. By Wednesday morning, FlightAware showed nine cancellations at ORD, including four on SkyWest.
The mismatch between the cancellations and the delays shows how hard the airport was being squeezed by flow control. United Airlines reported 19 cancellations and 518 delays out of Chicago, but 1,101 delays in total, which points to a system under pressure from timing and capacity rather than a simple wave of scrapped flights. On Tuesday, SkyWest, Republic and Envoy Air had the most ORD cancellations, followed by American Airlines.
American Airlines updated its travel alerts page on August 11 with a rebooking offer for ORD flights, saying travelers had to keep the same destination and cabin. United Airlines had a similar offer in place for Chicago Thunderstorms, and said a new flight must be booked by August 14. The immediate question for travelers is not whether the schedule was disrupted — it was — but how quickly carriers can unwind a three-day backlog after the FAA lifts the last of the restrictions.
