For about a year, American Airlines sold something odd as a flight: a motorcoach. Between South Bend, Indiana, and Chicago O'Hare, an 84-mile gap was filled by a Landline bus ticketed with a real flight number, TSA screening at the small local airport, and through-checked bags. Since October 2025 it fed two spokes into O'Hare — South Bend and Rockford. Now the Chicago side of the experiment is over, and the two endpoints got very different news.
South Bend came out ahead. Since October 2026, SkyWest has flown the route as American Eagle with Bombardier CRJ700 regional jets, three daily round trips. Blocked time drops from 2 hours 45 minutes on the coach to about 1 hour 15 minutes, and travellers get a dual-class cabin — including, for the first time on this link, a premium section. Fares start around $239 each way, a sharp contrast to the bus, which reportedly charged as much as $1,280 one-way. There's a trade-off: six daily buses have become three flights, and daily seats slip from 210 to 195. United still runs up to eight round trips a day on the same city pair, so American is betting on feed rather than frequency.
The bus confused people in ways a schedule doesn't show. One traveller booked what looked like a normal connecting itinerary to Virginia, only to discover mid-ride that the first leg was a coach; traffic delays cascaded into a missed connection, and the resulting video racked up more than 382,000 views. American maintained the product is clearly marketed as a premium motorcoach service, but the confusion was real enough that the airline has now pulled the plug in Chicago entirely.
Rockford fared worse. Its four daily coaches were dropped with an October 4 end date, communicated to the airport on July 31, 2026, with no replacement flights — just refunds or rebooking. That erased Rockford's only direct link to American's network, leaving travellers to drive farther or connect elsewhere. The contrast is telling: Landline survives where it makes sense, notably at Philadelphia, where buses still link five regional airports — Allentown/Bethlehem, Atlantic City, Trenton-Mercer, Wilmington and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton — and feed over 1,500 daily seats into the hub.
For travellers, the practical takeaway is simple. If you're flying from South Bend, you now get a genuine jet, a faster schedule and one-stop access to a hub claiming more than 350 onward destinations, alongside existing American service to Dallas/Fort Worth and Charlotte. If you're in Rockford, you've lost that option altogether. And if you're booking any American itinerary in the Northeast, double-check whether a leg is a bus — the product still exists, even if Chicago no longer has one.
