Summer Travel Misery: American Airlines Slams United’s ‘Reckless’ Tactics at Chicago O’Hare to ‘Flood the Zone’

American Airlines has slammed its arch-rival, United Airlines, over its ‘reckless’ actions at Chicago O’Hare, claiming that United’s plans to increase flights this summer from the busy airport threaten to cause travel misery for millions of passengers.

American’s chief operating officer, David Seymour, and chief commercial officer, Nat Pieper, told staffers in a new internal memo that United’s strategy to dominate O’Hare will cause “long taxi times, extensive tarmac delays, missed customer connections, disrupted crew sequences and cascading disruptions across the system.”

The tactic that United is trying to employ in Chicago is known within the aviation industry as ‘flooding the zone,’ in which an airline might operate flights unnecessarily in order to assert dominance at an airport and stifle competition from rival carriers.

For example, United is planning to operate as many as 11 daily flights between Chicago O’Hare and Grand Rapids in June, which is part of its ‘draw a line in the sand’ strategy against American Airlines.

The key issue is that American Airlines wants a greater share of the market in Chicago after neglecting O’Hare at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, due, in part, to regional pilot shortages and aircraft delivery delays.

But gate allocation at O’Hare is based on how many flights an airline operates in the previous year. In order to prevent American Airlines from expanding its presence at O’Hare any further, United has been accused of ‘dumping’ capacity into its summer schedule “with the hopes of preventing American from gaining the gates.”

New: @AmericanAir letter to employees on @united at ORD: “”Our lease at ORD contains a unique provision that allocates gates based on how much flying each airline operates in the previous year. This provision provides the context behind a decision by United to dump capacity into… pic.twitter.com/3H9oKxtTj4

— David Shepardson (@davidshepardson) March 3, 2026

“Because we were slower to rebuild Chicago after the pandemic, we lost a few gates in the airport’s first gate reallocation. Now, because of our growth in 2025, we expect to earn gates back in October,” Seymour and Pieper explained.

“In response, United declared they would ‘draw a line in the sand’ and ‘add as many flights as are required’ to prevent American from gaining any more gates at ORD,” the memo continued.

United is set to increase its flying schedule by as much as 34% year on year – an additional 130 flights per day, pushing O’Hare to what could be a breaking point.

“In multiple parts of the day, United alone has more scheduled departures than the FAA’s maximum published departure rate — and that’s before accounting for any other airline,” the memo added.

Chicago O’Hare was on course for its busiest summer on record – a situation that Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, says would have resulted in a “bad experience for everyone in and out of Chicago.”

With the prospect of a “summer of hell” (as Nelson described it), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has now stepped in to reduce overscheduling at O’Hare.

Seymour and Pieper describe United’s 2026 summer growth at O’Hare as a “ploy to overschedule the airport to manipulate a provision which was meant to promote competition, seemingly without regard for ORD customers, team members or airport partners.”

“We don’t need to speculate about United’s intentions. Its senior leaders have been clear about their motivations as far back as 2017, and as recently as last month.”

The FAA is set to meet with airlines on Tuesday, where schedule reductions will be thrashed out. No final decision has, however, been taken.