Departure
97%
vs 95% ▲ 2
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Chicago Midway International Airport (KMDW) is a major commercial airport on the southwest side of Chicago, Illinois, and the historic home of Southwest Airlines' Chicago operations. Squeezed into a single square mile of dense urban development, its short intersecting runways and Class C airspace make it a distinctive and demanding destination for the simulator pilot flying VFR or IFR into the city.
Chicago Midway International Airport lies on the southwest side of the city, operated by the Chicago Department of Aviation and serving as an operating base for Southwest Airlines. Once Chicago's principal airport, it is now the metropolitan area's second-busiest field, of interest to sim pilots for its confined urban site, short runways and its role alongside the much larger O'Hare International Airport.
Midway sits within Class C airspace on the southwest side of Chicago, in the Clearing and Garfield Ridge communities, roughly 12 miles from the Loop business district. The entire airfield is contained within a single square mile bounded by 55th and 63rd Streets and Central and Cicero Avenues, with O'Hare International Airport's Class B airspace lying to the northwest.
Midway has four physical runways, all hard-surfaced and lit. Runway 13C/31C is 6,058 ft one way and 5,820 ft the other, with an ILS available on 13C. Runway 04R/22L runs 5,922 ft/5,810 ft, with an ILS on 04R. Runway 04L/22R measures 4,747 ft/4,629 ft, and the shortest pair, 13R/31L, is 3,847 ft in each direction. The field elevation is 610 ft.
Midway is served by a full suite of radio facilities: Approach/Departure on 118.4 MHz, ATIS and ASOS both on 132.75 MHz, Clearance Delivery, Ground on 121.65 MHz, Tower on 118.7 MHz, and a Clearance Delivery frequency of 121.85 MHz for read-back. A UNICOM frequency of 122.95 MHz is also listed. The airport has ILS approaches available to runways 13C and 04R.
As a Class C, air traffic control tower-operated airport, all arrivals and departures at Midway are sequenced and controlled by ATC rather than flown as an uncontrolled traffic pattern; pilots should expect to be worked by Approach, Tower and Ground in turn when transiting the surrounding controlled airspace.
Midway began life in 1923 as Chicago Air Park, a 320-acre site with a single cinder runway used mainly for airmail flights. The city leased the airport in 1926 and named it Chicago Municipal Airport on 12 December 1927. By 1928 it had twelve hangars and four lit runways for night operations, and a major fire in June 1930 destroyed two hangars and 27 aircraft, with losses estimated at more than two million dollars. A new terminal opened in 1931, and by 1932 the airport was claiming to be the world's busiest, with over 100,000 passengers on nearly 61,000 flights that year. Further expansion followed in 1938-41, funded partly by the Works Progress Administration, after the airport's boundaries were cleared of railway tracks. Midway overtook New York's LaGuardia as the busiest airline airport in the United States in 1948 and held that position until 1960, with passenger numbers peaking at 10 million in 1959. In July 1949 the airport was renamed in honour of the Battle of Midway. Hemmed in on all sides by the surrounding city, Midway could not expand its runways to handle the four-engine jetliners entering service from 1959, and jet traffic was progressively directed to the newly opened O'Hare International Airport, which took over as Chicago's primary airport by 1962.
Midway remains a major commercial airport and the busiest in the Chicago area after O'Hare, serving over 22 million passengers in 2023. It is a base for Southwest Airlines, which carries the large majority of the airport's passengers, and its terminal complex, completed in 2001, straddles Cicero Avenue with 43 gates including facilities for international arrivals.
