Eighty-eight acres of an active airfield, at the airport with more takeoffs and landings than any other in the world, and not one foot of FAA pavement closed.
That’s the claim from Zach Baughman, chief development officer and managing deputy commissioner at the Chicago Department of Aviation, describing where the roughly $8.8 billion ORD Next programme has got to. Concourse D is a bit over a year into vertical construction. Enabling work for it started in 2018.
The line-of-sight problem nobody budgets for
Two taxiways west of the site, Tango and Romeo, didn’t exist before summer 2026. They exist now because the concourse is getting tall enough to cut the tower’s FAA line of sight to the taxiways that were already there.
Building a taxiway to replace the sightline to a taxiway is the kind of second-order cost that turns up halfway through a programme. Funding came from reallocated federal money, previously approved project funding, and additional money for the interim condition.
Those taxiways need ground to sit on, and the ground was a stormwater detention basin holding 600,000 cubic yards of retention. The fix: fill the central basin with soil excavated out of the Concourse D site, pave the taxiways over it, and expand the south basin by the same volume to replace the capacity. Connecting the two required a 1.5-mile tunnel, 14.5 feet in diameter, driven under the airfield while the airport kept operating. It was finished last year.
One transcription note: the source article gives the basin volume as both “600 cubic yards” and “600,000 cubic yards.” The larger figure is the one consistent with the rest of the description, and it’s what’s used here.
A lawyer running the programme
Baughman is a lawyer, not a builder, and his answer about what surprised him is worth more than most executive quotes. “I would not have thought coming into this job that the communications piece of it is really key to successful delivery.”
He applies it as a filter: “If my team, or if one of our contractors, can’t explain why we’re doing something to someone without a construction background, then they probably don’t understand it sufficiently enough themselves.”
Coordination runs across the airlines, the TSA on security lanes, and the FAA on the movement area. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is credited for the Concourse D exterior.
What isn’t disclosed
This is a Q&A, not reported coverage, so every figure here is owner-stated. No general contractor, CM or engineer is named. There’s no cost variance, no schedule variance, and no completion date for the programme as a whole. “Busiest airport in the world” is by takeoffs and landings, not passengers, and that distinction gets lost constantly.
The full listing for the concourse is here.
The transferable lesson is about enabling works. Eight years between the first enabling contract and the first column is not delay. On an airfield that can’t stop, it’s the job.
Source: Construction Dive.