Chicago O’Hare International Airport, typically referred to as O’Hare Airport, Chicago O’Hare, or simply O’Hare, is the main international airport located on the Northwest Side of Chicago, Illinois, 17 miles (27 km) northwest of the Loop business district. Operated by the Chicago Department of Aviation and covering 7,627 acres (3,087 ha),[4] O’Hare has non-stop flights to 228 destinations in North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and the North Atlantic region as of 2018.
Designed to be the successor to Chicago’s Midway International Airport, itself nicknamed the „busiest square mile in the world,“ O’Hare began as an airfield serving a Douglas manufacturing plant for C-54 military transports during World War II. It was renamed Orchard Field Airport in the mid 1940s and assigned the IATA code ORD. In 1949. it was renamed after Edward „Butch“ O’Hare, the U.S. Navy’s first Medal of Honor recipient during that war. As the first major airport planned after World War II, O’Hare’s innovative design pioneered concepts such as concourses, direct highway access to the terminal, jet bridges, and underground refueling systems.
O’Hare became famous during the jet age, holding the distinction as the world’s busiest airport from 1963 to 1998; today, it is the world’s fourth-busiest airport for passenger counts, serving 54 million passengers in 2021. In 2019, O’Hare had 919,704 aircraft movements, averaging 2,520 per day, the most of any airport in the world in part because of a large number of regional flights. O’Hare serves as a major hub for both United Airlines (which is headquartered in Willis Tower) and American Airlines. It is also a focus city for Spirit Airlines.