Originally Posted by bdjohns1

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot are you smoking?

ORD would be particularly painful to reconfigure - everyone would either have to exit security and take the people-mover to T5 for international connections (which would probably then be massively over capacity in terms of # of gates and need to expand somehow), or the alternate would need to be that some portion of the B concourse in T1 (probably the high # side) would need to be converted to international departures for *A members (UA, CO, AC), and one of the smaller T3 concourses (G or L) would need to be done for the other international flights that currently depart from T2/T3. Both would require interior/exterior changes to accommodate 747/767/777 operations in gates that don't have enough space outside for the plane, or inside for the passengers.

Either option would probably cost hundreds of millions to implement.