The chief scheduler for a major airline sits in front of his computer screen. With a tap of the Enter key, he approves a new flight schedule that switches most of his east-west connecting flights from Chicago to Denver.

Delays at Chicago's overcrowded O'Hare Airport were provoking so many passenger complaints — and costing the airline so much money in extra fuel and labor that the move made good sense.

But as a result, fewer passengers move through Chicago. Hotels and restaurants in the northwest suburbs feel the cutback first. Soon, local and state governments notice reduced tax revenues. The travel and hospitality industries scale back. With Chicago shedding its reputation as the nation's transportation center, businesses decide not to locate there.

When might this dire scenario be played out? The major airlines at O'Hare say it would not happen for decades, if ever. Gov. Jim Edgar's administration contends it will happen within a few years unless a new regional airport is built at south suburban Peotone.

The airport question has produced a classic Republican vs. Democrat, suburbs vs. Chicago division. In fact, this session the suburban GOP-controlled General Assembly is considering whether to create a public authority to supervise Chicago's O'Hare and Midway airports and authorize construction of the Peotone field.

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"The governor is free to pursue construction of an airport whenever he chooses, but I will not participate," Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has said, drawing a hard line in the political struggle.

The political question of who should control the airports is complex, but the economic question of whether a third airport is needed would seem to be relatively simple. What is the air traffic capacity at O'Hare and Midway, and when will that capacity be filled?

It probably will not surprise you to hear that, with economists involved, the question is not simple at all. Opponents and proponents of Peotone alike have trotted out statistics from government agencies and private consultants to prove their case. If nothing else, the third-airport controversy is a boon for the consulting industry.

Airlines would finance a new airport because their landing and gate-use fees would back up the construction bonds. And they portray Peotone as a $5 billion boondoggle that would drain flights and revenues from O'Hare, threatening its status as the nation's most successful airport. The state insists that O'Hare will continue to run full-throttle and Peotone is needed to handle the growth in air traffic.

Considering the question of airport capacity will require some explanation of aviation jargon. An operation is a takeoff or landing. An enplanement is one person boarding an airplane. An O/D is not an overdose on airport rhetoric. It means a flight whose origin or destination is at the airport, as opposed to a connecting flight.

O'Hare already has reached its operational limit, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation. In 1986, capacity was estimated at 868,000 operations a year. That level was met by 1993 and last year's operations topped 900,000.

Enplanements are even trickier to predict. The air fare wars that followed airline deregulation in 1978 helped create a boom in air travel in the 1980s. The Federal Aviation Administration has tended to project that boom into the future.

In 1988, the FAA forecasted 36.8 million enplanements at O'Hare in 1994. The actual number for 1994 was 30 million. Similarly, the FAA forecasted 23.9 million enplanements at Denver in 1994. The actual figure was just 14.8 million.

Denver International Airport, 24 miles from downtown, replaced Stapleton Airport, seven miles from downtown, a year ago. It opened $3.2 billion over budget and 16 months late and has fallen far short of projected O/D traffic. The airlines foretell a similar outcome should Peotone, 32 miles from the Loop, supplement O'Hare, 19 miles from the Loop.

Currently, the FAA is projecting 42 million O'Hare enplanements by the turn of the century. Michael J. Boyd, president of Colorado-based Aviation Systems Research Corp., whose numbers have proven more reliable than the FAA's, projects 39.1 million at O'Hare. (Boyd takes no position on the Peotone controversy.)

The transportation department is projecting that by 2001,O'Hare will see 33 million enplanements and Midway 6.6 million, just about the numbers they are handling now — provided that a new Peotone airport takes care of the projected overflow of 7.1 million enplanements.

Will these 7.1 million enplanements materialize, and could O'Hare and Midway absorb them? Here the airlines argue that operations and enplanement figures both are misleading.

To schedulers and travelers, capacity means an available seat. Planes are flying out of Chicago with more than enough empty seats to handle added demand for decades to come. The Air Transport Association says the industry's "load factor" of the number of seats filled, while the highest on record, is still only 65 percent. A load-factor figure for O'Hare alone is not available.

Peotone proponents counter that the "seats available" measure is academic because there won't be enough seats at times passengers want to fly, to places they want to go. Excess

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demand already prompts the FAA to limit operations at O'Hare to 155 an hour — a takeoff or landing every 23 seconds — between 6:45 a.m. and 9:15 p.m. Each "high-density rule operation," usually called a "slot," is worth millions of dollars to the airlines that hold them.

The city of Chicago, which runs O'Hare, recently asked the FAA to consider raising the 155-slot limit. The FAA said no dice because of potential air traffic hazards and added delays.

Now imagine again that the chief of airline scheduling is facing a computer screen. He would like to add more flights to profitable, peak-hour, long-distance destinations, but there aren't any more slots at O'Hare. Meanwhile, experts foresee an extra 7.1 million enplanements within five years.

He is aware that more than half of O'Hare's traffic comprises connecting passengers, not O/D passengers who live in the region. The solution to the overcrowding problem appears easy. Shift connecting flights elsewhere and fill the precious O'Hare slots with more O/Ds. Automatically, the airline's capacity is enhanced without cramming any more airplanes into O'Hare.

This move might seem especially attractive for United, O'Hare's biggest carrier, which has unused capacity at its secondary hub at Denver; or American, O'Hare's second biggest carrier, which has unused capacity at its primary hub at Dallas/Fort Worth.

Friends and foes of the Peotone project agree on this point: The flight capacity of O'Hare and Midway is adequate for many years to come for O/D traffic alone. Even the transportation department's figure of 7.1 million additional enplanements in 2001 counts only 3.1 million O/Ds — the rest are connecting passengers changing planes. Overflow demand, if any, will come from the growth in connecting traffic.

"Illinois seems to think it has a God-given right to all the connecting flights in the Midwest," says one airline industry official who requested anonymity.

It is Chicago's status as a central connecting hub that makes air travel such a money-maker for the Illinois economy. At least that was one of the arguments Daley made when advocating a third airport at Lake Calumet on the south edge of the city. Daley dropped the proposal in the face of stiff state Senate opposition in 1992. He maintains the Peotone site is too remote from the city to succeed.

In any event, the area's primacy as a connecting hub is important to the state's economy. It is not necessarily important to the airlines.

"If you build a new airport, the airlines are going to pay for it, not tax dollars," says Robert L. York Jr., transportation's project manager for Peotone. That means the state must persuade the airlines that the Chicago area will remain the best place for midcontinent connecting flights.

This case is more subtle and more difficult than the mere proposition that air traffic will continue to increase. Transportation officials insist that for reasons of location, convenience, market accessibility and infrastructure, the airlines should stay here, in a new triple-airport system. "This is the best geographic location that you can find in the world for both domestic and international flights," York says.

The department is still crunching numbers for its financial study and does not plan to launch its major lobbying campaign with the airlines until this spring, maybe this month. Meanwhile, the airlines remain a hard sell.

"The number of people coming to or leaving Chicago who would choose to fly from Peotone is zero," Robert L. Crandall, head of American Airlines, has said. So much for the industry's confidence in the state's projection of 3.1 million O/Ds at Peotone in its first year of operation.

"Airline economics are such that Peotone would not work unless you hurt O'Hare and Midway" by imposing flight restrictions, says Mary Frances Fagan, a spokeswoman for Crandall.

Suppose now that our mythical airline scheduler works for Crandall. He has a choice of listening to his boss or to the Edgar Administration. Don't bet on the governor.

James L. Merriner has written about third parties and conservatives for Illinois Issues. He has been political editor for the Atlanta Constitution and political writer for the Chicago Sun-Times and is a freelance journalist. He's currently writing a biography of former U. S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski of Chicago.

Liftoff or crash landing for local economies? Every takeoff or landing at O'Hare Airport pumps $15,700 into the regional economy, according to the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. With flight operations now surpassing 900,000 a year, the total economic boost is $14.1 billion. If operations declined just 10 percent, the effects would be gruesome: 36,000 jobs lost and $1.5 billion in annual personal income lost, chamber officials say. O'Hare operations will fall off if a competing new airport is built, argue opponents of the proposed airport at Peotone. Proponents say O'Hare will lose business if Peotone is not built, because the airlines will shift connecting flights to less crowded fields in other states. The Illinois Department of Transportation also contends that building Peotone would create 46,300 construction jobs by 2001 and 101,800 construction jobs by 2020. New permanent jobs would number 53,000 in 2001 and 236,200 in 2020, according to the department. - James L. Merriner

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