United CEO Pressures FAA Over O'Hare Controller Staffing, 28-Minute Taxi Times

Aircraft at Chicago O'Hare average 28 minutes taxiing from gate to takeoff and 20 minutes from runway to gate after landing — figures that rank among the longest taxi times in the United States, according to FAA data cited by ABC7 Chicago.

United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby is now pressing the Federal Aviation Administration, the US aviation regulator, to add air traffic controllers at the airport. He made the case publicly at the Executives' Club of Chicago, attributing the delays to two causes: controller staffing shortages and the airport's runway configuration, which forces aircraft to travel around runways rather than cross them.

The most concrete operational detail in Kirby's argument concerns the south control tower. He said it is frequently unstaffed, which limits how many runways the airport can actively use at any given time. When the tower is staffed, aircraft taxi times fall by six to seven minutes per flight, according to the CEO.

That six-to-seven-minute saving is not a marginal figure when multiplied across an operation of O'Hare's scale. Taxi time is unproductive time: aircraft burn fuel, crews burn duty hours, and schedules absorb delay that propagates through banks of connecting flights. For a hub carrier such as United, which operates a major connecting operation at O'Hare, per-flight taxi reductions compound into meaningful gains in aircraft utilization and schedule reliability.

What does this change for O'Hare's capacity?

The dispute matters because O'Hare is simultaneously experiencing growing flight activity and undergoing a major terminal expansion. Earlier this year, the FAA imposed limits on flight operations at the airport, citing congestion and the state of available infrastructure. Kirby's argument, in effect, is that the airport's capacity problem is partly administrative rather than physical: additional controllers would let the airport make better use of runways it already has and improve operational efficiency, rather than waiting for construction to add throughput.

The claim places the burden of proof on the FAA's staffing pipeline. Air traffic controller hiring and training has been a persistent constraint across the US system, and unstaffed tower positions reduce the flexibility of runway configurations at multi-runway airports. O'Hare's layout — with parallel runway groups that depend on coordinated control — is particularly sensitive to which towers and positions are manned during peak banks.

At the time of ABC7's report, neither the FAA nor the Chicago Department of Aviation, the airport's operator, had responded to requests for comment. Without a regulator response, Kirby's figures stand as airline-side assertions drawn from FAA taxi-time data, not as an agreed diagnosis.

The timing gives the dispute weight. A terminal expansion is designed to raise passenger and gate capacity at O'Hare; if controller staffing caps runway utilization below what the airfield can physically handle, the expansion delivers less than its full value. Conversely, if the FAA's operational limits imposed earlier this year remain in force, new gates alone will not translate into additional flights.

For United, the practical question is schedule competitiveness. Shorter taxi times translate directly into shorter block times (the total duration from gate departure to gate arrival), which affects aircraft rotation, crew planning and connection windows across the hub. A carrier cannot unilaterally change runway configuration or tower staffing, which is why the CEO has taken the argument to a public forum rather than to the ramp.

The outcome now depends on whether the FAA commits to staffing increases at O'Hare, and whether the Chicago Department of Aviation engages on the runway-configuration constraints Kirby identified. With flight activity growing and construction ongoing, the gap between available runway capacity and controlled capacity will remain the measurable test of both.