• Posted: July 10, 2019
• better construction, Hartmann Electric, John Hartmann, O’Hare Airport American Airline Terminal

 

Overshadowed by the $8.7b O’Hare Airport expansion that’ll bring in new terminal upgrades, new baggage handling technology, a hotel, and other amenities for the region’s busiest airport is the continued upgrading and expansion for one of O’Hare’s main tenants: American Airlines.

O’Hare serves as American Airlines’ third largest hub in the world and in January, the airline finally pulled the curtains off its new hangar. The hangar, which is roughly 191,000 square feet, is the first new hangar to be built at O’Hare in 30 years and is now the largest on site.

The cost of the new hangar came in at $215 million and Powering Chicago member Hartmann Electric was one of many contractors and subcontractors working on the project.

“The only scope we weren’t responsible for was some of the site lighting and power outside of the building envelope, but we did all the switchgear, systems, low voltage, lighting and backup power.  You name it, we did it,” said John Hartmann, Vice President, Hartmann Electric.

This wasn’t the first aviation hangar that Hartmann Electric has worked on, but it was the first the company took on that included every facet of the project. Hartmann worked on the project for 13 months and had a max crew size of 64 IBEW Local 134 electricians.

What made American’s new hangar especially unique and challenging for Hartmann Electric and the IBEW 134 electricians wasn’t just the sheer volume of the workload or the size of the hangar, but the height at which the crew was working.

“Instead of a typical building where everything might be 20 feet up, this was 100 feet up and that’s your cameras, power, everything,” said Hartmann. “One other challenge was finding enough guys who are comfortable going up that high and working in those conditions. We had 60-plus guys on the job, and it becomes harder finding that many who are willing to work at those elevations.”

The project posed unique challenges because two long sides of the building were moveable doors where wiring and conduit couldn’t be fitted. Instead, Hartman had to run the conduit up over the moveable doors to ensure there wasn’t anything in the way of the aircraft that would be coming in and out of the hangar. It’s unusual that a hangar has two operational doors; typically, there’s just one.

“To ensure everything was in its proper place, the general foreman on the job provided laminated drawings with color coded conduit and would have all of the materials corresponding to the work shown on each drawing ready to send back up to ensure that we were not wasting any time letting the costly lifts sit idle to ensure the project kept running smoothly, safely and on time,” Hartmann explained. “There’s another smaller building on the other side of the hangar that needed to be fed with fiber and power. So, it was just quite an undertaking and having such a huge majority of the work done at 100 feet up was probably the most difficult part.”

The hangar is now fully operational and allows American Airlines to work on its aircrafts overnight to perform any necessary maintenance that may be needed. American Airlines will be critical to O’Hare’s continued expansion and this hangar will help keep planes running smoothly for years to come.