The airline said Tuesday, July 22, when it reported a $2.73 billion second-quarter loss, that it would cut 7,000 jobs from its companywide workforce of 55,000 by the end of next year. That’s more than twice the level disclosed so far. About 5,500 of the cuts will be among frontline workers and come in addition to 1,500 white-collar layoffs already announced.

About half of United’s 7,500 salaried and management workers are based in Chicago, and nearly one-fourth of its 48,000 frontline employees work in the area, mostly at O’Hare International Airport.

O’Hare, which handles about 20 percent of United’s flights, also is being hit hard by the airline’s drastic cutbacks in flight capacity, which will take effect after the summer travel season. By the end of the fourth quarter, United’s U.S. capacity will be down 13.5 percent from the year-earlier period. Flight capacity at O’Hare will be down 12 percent, COO John Tague told analysts in a conference call Tuesday.

Only Los Angeles and Denver will see bigger cutbacks, at 20 percent and 16 percent, respectively. San Francisco will be down 11 percent, and Washington will be down 3 percent.

“We’ll feel it here,” says Aaron Gellman, a professor at Northwestern University’s Transportation Center. “It’s a blow to Chicago. We’re going to see less mobility, higher prices and fewer jobs.”

United—a unit of Chicago-based UAL Corp.—and other airlines have been cutting U.S. flight schedules in an effort to boost fares, which has worked to some degree, though it hasn’t been enough to offset fuel prices that are more than 50 percent higher than a year ago.

“It’s harder and harder to make money on those things,” says Michael Boyd, president of Boyd Group, an aviation consulting firm in Evergreen, Colorado. “It probably costs United well over $100,000 one way for fuel to fly to Tokyo. That’s ugly stuff. The idea was, international routes would feed domestic ones. But some of those markets don’t have enough connecting feeds to make them work.”

UAL reported Tuesday a second-quarter net loss of $2.73 billion, or $21.47 per share, compared with profit of $274 million, or $1.83 per share, a year earlier.

UAL said operating revenue increased by 3 percent in the quarter to $5.37 billion. The company paid $1.85 billion for fuel, an increase of 53.2 percent.

The company ended the quarter with an unrestricted cash balance of $2.9 billion and a restricted cash balance of $655 million.

Filed by John Pletz of Crain’s Chicago Business, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.