Chicago Terminal
I returned home yesterday from a five day trip to Chicago. I’d been there before but never spent much time exploring the city. I was impressed.
The city is hot because it has the feel of a very big, metropolitan, exciting city. It has huge buildings, including the Sears Tower, the tallest building in North America, great architecture, a fine rapid transit system, and lots of conveniences. Chicago is very clean and the streets, buildings and people for that matter, were well kept.
The point of this is to compare the rest of the city to O’Hare Airport.
I flew US Airways in and out of Chicago. The flights were on time and the flight attendants were shall I say unique, but I regress…
Anyways, once I got off the plane, I didn’t really pay attention to my surroundings in O’Hare. But I did notice on my way back.
I arrived at the airport early because I was traveling with a friend whose flight left about an hour and a half before mine. That, and my desire to always arrive at the airport, any airport, early, gave me a lot of time to explore. (I like to get to the airport about an hour and a half before my flight so I don’t get stressed out with any lines or other challenges that might come my way.) On this trip, I had about of total of three hours to check things out.
Now, I understand that the United area of Chicago O’Hare is nice. I don’t know about that because I never made it over there. However, the US Airways area which it shares with Northwest, Continental and I guess other airlines needs help. The ticket counter was cluttered and not very clean. Going thru security wasn’t any special or not special; I guess you’d say it was fine.
The main concern I had was the gate area. It was extremely dated and too small for the traffic it receives. It looked as if the terminal hadn’t seen a new coat of paint for decades. It was very dirty and unkempt. There weren’t nearly enough seats in the waiting areas for all the passengers and what seats that were there were old and not arranged in a convenient manner.
The US Airways gate podium was still using the plastic signs (that give the flight number and city name of the flight) that were popular about two decades ago. And, by the way, these signs had to be the original signs from back in the day and didn’t age very well.
I needed to charge my battery of my computer. That was a challenge. I’m one of those guys that doesn’t mind sitting on the floor as long as there’s an outlet. I searched for outlets throughout the Terminals E and F. What outlets there were there were few and far between. Most of these outlets didn’t work. As a matter of fact, they didn’t seem safe. The few that did were being used by other people like me.
The reason I’m writing about this is because the city is great. And this classy Midwestern city deserves an airport that complements the rest of its impressiveness.