Chicago Midway International Airport Facts for Kids

Quick facts for kids

Chicago Midway International Airport

Aerial view of Chicago Midway International Airport, a.k.a. the "world's busiest square mile".

IATA: MDW
ICAO: KMDW
FAA LID: MDW

Summary

Airport type

Public

Owner

City of Chicago

Operator

Chicago Airport System

Serves

Chicago, Illinois, US

Elevation AMSL

620 ft / 189 m

Website

www.flychicago.com

Maps

FAA airport diagram

Lua error in Module:Location_map at line 420: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).

Runway

Runway	Length		Surface
Runway	ft	m	Surface
4L/22R	5,507	1,679	Asphalt
4R/22L	6,446	1,965	Asphalt/Concrete
13C/31C	6,522	1,988	Concrete
13L/31R	5,141	1,567	Asphalt
13R/31L	3,859	1,176	Concrete

Statistics (2008, 2010)

Aircraft operations (2008)	253,901
Passenger volume (2010)	17,566,281
Cargo tonnage (2008)	14,254
Enplanemants (2010)	8,856,025

Source: FAA and airport website

Chicago Midway International Airport (airport code KMDW) is a secondary airport serving the city of Chicago, Illinois. It was the largest airport in Chicago before O'Hare International Airport was built. It is on the South Side of Chicago.

History
- Incidents
Airlines
Images for kids
See also

History

Originally named Chicago Air Park, Midway Airport was built on a 320-acre (1.3 km²) plot in 1923 with one cinder runway that primarily served airmail services. In 1926 the city leased the airport for commercial purposes. The airport was designated as Chicago Municipal Airport on December 12, 1927. By 1928 the airport had twelve hangars and four runways, lit for night operations.

In 1931 a new passenger terminal opened at 62nd St; the following year the airport claimed to be the "World's Busiest" with over 100,846 passengers on 60,947 flights. The March 1939 OAG shows 47 weekday departures: 13 on United, 13 American, 9 TWA, 4 Northwest and two each on Eastern, Braniff, Pennsylvania Central and C&S. New York's airport (Newark, then LaGuardia by the end of 1939) was then the busiest airline airport in the United States, but Midway passed LaGuardia in 1948 and kept the title until 1960.

More construction was funded in part by $1 million from the Works Progress Administration; the airport expanded to fill the square mile in 1938–41 after a court ordered the Chicago and Western Indiana Railroad to reroute tracks that had crossed the square along the north edge of the older field.

The Southwest airplane that crashed in December 2005.

Incidents

On June 30, 1956, United Airlines Flight 718, a Douglas DC-7, was headed for Midway Airport. Over the Grand Canyon it collided with a TWA Super Constellation, killing all 128 people on both planes. This became the impetus for the modern air traffic control system.

On December 8, 1972, United Airlines Flight 553, a Boeing 737-200, crashed into a residential area outside Midway during landing. The crash of the 737-200 killed 43 of the 61 on board, and two on the ground.

Exactly 33 years later, on December 8, 2005, Southwest Airlines Flight 1248, a Boeing 737-700 inbound from Baltimore-Washington International Airport in Baltimore, Maryland, slid off the runway while attempting to land at the airport in a heavy snow storm. The airplane broke through the barrier fence of the airport, and came to rest at the intersection of 55th Street and Central Avenue bordering the airport at its northwest corner. A 6-year-old boy was killed as a passenger in a vehicle that was struck by the plane after it skidded into the street.