Last fall, American Airlines launched a new type of connection through O’Hare International Airport that relies on a surprising form of transportation: bus.
Since October, American has used bus service to help connect passengers traveling from South Bend and Rockford to O’Hare, where they can catch flights to their final destinations. But the buses have caused confusion for some travelers who became unwitting ground passengers when they thought they were booking flights.
Kennedy Woodard-Jones went viral on TikTok after a flight she thought she was taking from South Bend to O’Hare turned out to be a bus ride.
“When you buy a flight from American Airlines but they board you on to a bus on the tarmac so you think they’re driving you to the plane but they just start driving to the destination,” she captioned her TikTok, which has since garnered 1.8 million likes.
In interviews with the Tribune, executives for American and the Landline Co. — the company with which the airline partners to offer short-haul bus trips — said the partnership is meant to help connect travelers in smaller communities with better air service.
David Sunde founded Landline in 2018. Having worked in airline network planning, he said, he saw flight service evaporating at small regional airports.
A pilot shortage was one factor, Sunde said. Another problem for short-haul flights out of tiny airports: The planes used for those routes were getting old.
“What I saw was communities like Rockford and Allentown and Scranton and Atlantic City slowly losing their connectivity to major airline hubs,” said Sunde, Landline’s CEO. “It was getting harder for people in small communities to connect to the rest of the world.”
Landline works with American, Air Canada and Sun Country, a low-cost airline based in Minnesota.
More Top Picks Best Spokeshaves
American launched Landline service to O’Hare in October 2025 from Rockford and South Bend. It also runs Landline service from a handful of small regional airports on the East Coast to Philadelphia International Airport.
When passengers take a Landline bus ride, they go through security screening at the smaller airport from which they are to depart.
They then board the bus, are driven to their destination airport, and get off the bus on the tarmac to connect to their gate there. Their bags come with them. Internet service and snacks are available, although there are no “flight” attendants on the bus. Passengers earn miles just like they would on a plane trip.
“It’s like a flight in every way except it doesn’t leave the ground,” said Brian Znotins, American’s senior vice president of network planning. “All of the experience is the same, other than leaving the ground.”
Znotins argued that the bus service has some operational advantages over air travel for short-haul trips. There’s more legroom than on some of American’s planes, he said. And bus trips can be more resilient against some weather conditions.
Landline rides are intended for connecting passengers — not for people who are traveling just from South Bend or Rockford to Chicago. Znotins acknowledges that the airline makes prices for those non-connecting trips expensive to discourage non-connecting customers from booking them.
Znotins said American started its partnership with Landline when the airline was short on pilots coming out of the pandemic and saw bus rides as an operational solution. “We couldn’t fly as much as we wanted to,” he said.
Znotins said the airline takes care to make clear to passengers that they are getting on a bus for a portion of their journey, not a jet. On the airline’s website, alerts note when an itinerary “includes travel on luxury bus.”
However, Znotins said, communication about the bus aspect is sometimes less clear on third-party sites. “We’re working with them to make sure that this all gets translated into their systems as well,” he said.
On TikTok, Woodard-Jones — whose story was covered by The Washington Post and then picked up by a number of other outlets —- said her flight had been booked through a workplace portal.
Aviation expert Joseph Schwieterman, director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul, described the use of bus connections as a “logical response” to the growing cost of short-hop flying.
For short trips, the travel time difference between a bus ride and a flight can end up very small when accounting for the lack of a need to taxi on a bus, Schwieterman said.
“The biggest hurdle is the stigma that is placed on bus travel,” he said.