Would this airport design proposal work?

Factual Questions
1

This article from aviation industry blog Innaxis proposes a new approach to airport design. In summary (my paraphrase), it suggests that terminal buildings should be optimised landside rather than airside: There is no need, the author argues, to have the terminal buildings close to the runways; instead, they could be built where there is lots of space for and convenient access to ground transportation facilities (rail lines, roads, car parks…), and if that’s miles away from the runways, you shuttle passengers there, analogous to what is already happening with satellite terminals that are detached from a main terminal building.

Would this work? Obviously, you’d need to ensure that the transport link that carries security-cleared passengers from the terminal to the plane is secured and that nobody can access it en route. This is, I suppose, feasible - many airports already have trains connecting different terminals with each other without transit passengers having to clear security again. But overall, would the logistics be feasible?

2

What happens, for instance, if there’s a last minute delay to the flight? What facilities are available in the gate area of this airport? What if there’s a layover of an hour or so?

3

If I’m understanding the concept correctly…

It’s just trading one issue for another, and the other is more costly.

Now you’ll need dedicated passenger shuttles (trains?) to move passengers from the terminals to the planes, which could be several miles (more?) away. Pray you don’t miss the train!

Luggage needs to be moved to the planes, too. There’s another train that runs ahead of the passengers.

Arrivals need a train that can accommodate every passenger AND the baggage.

And as you noted, security is three times worse. It isn’t just the one terminal-baggage-planes as one fenced secure area, now you have the terminal, the trains, the tracks, the remote boarding area and the runways.

4

They could put a building at the drop off point with a few bathrooms, restaurants and a Hudson News.

5

Lots of airports already do that, though. You check in, pass through security, go down an escalator, then take the train a couple hundred yards out to the satellite terminal. If I understand the proposal correctly, since the passengers are doing that already, just extend the ride so the gates are a couple miles from the check-in.

I can see issues with it. Atlanta has the option to take a train or a walkway to the terminals. If it was a couple miles, the train becomes mandatory. If it breaks down, you’re going to have a lot of unhappy people.

On the other hand, lots of airports are size constrained and have to make the best use of whatever land then can get. Plenty of places have moved the rental car facilities to free up space for more parking. Moving the check-in, baggage, and security would be similar.

6

I’ve been in a few not-so-big (and some big) airports where rather than having the gates and bridges, they bus people to and from the aircraft. Or, this is a backup in busy times when the gates are full.

The problem is also last-minute arrivals. By making the cut-off so much earlier than the flight, you risk losing passengers who would otherwise make it. I.e. do I really have to drive half-way across the city, away from the airport, to check in and retrace the route on a bus? And now you have to do expensive downtown parking instead of long term parking in a remote area with a lot of land (or at least it was when the runways were built). You now need to handle baggage a lot longer, more often. Then there’s the issue of security theatre - if you put people through security early, then the whole bus/train infrastructure needs to be secure not just the final building. You have to vet even more bus drivers, train cleaners, etc.

I think the idea of generic check-ins at assorted locations (rail station before you take the shuttle to the airport) where one desk can service any airline - might have a limited utility, but we have online self check-in nowadays anyway. And again, for international flights, they still have to check documentation before boarding as person A and B may have swapped tickets in the terminal…

7

I seem to remember that some airlines had arrangements with some hotels that allowed you to check your luggage at the hotel and they’d arrange to get the bags to the plane so you only needed to lug the carry-on bags to the airport. And Disney World used to have an arrangement where you could take their shuttle bus from the airport while they collected your checked bags to be delivered to your hotel room.

8

I’m a bit confused. The author is saying that since only a certain number of people take the train to the airport, then it’s an improvement to have all people take a train at the airport?

From the article:

The car parks could have been right next to the terminal instead of, as is the case with T5, being so far away that the airport has had to spend £30m to provide personal transport “Pods” to transfer people to and from the terminal.

But…he’s still suggesting that the gates be far away from the parking lot, isn’t he? Isn’t it just shifting one annoying ride (that can be avoided if you don’t park at the airport) to a different annoying ride (that all passengers have to submit to)?

I remember checking a suitcase at a Hong Kong subway station and then taking the train to the airport. Apparently they stopped doing that in 2020, though.

9

Surely the ideal design puts EVERYTHING in proximity?

Having just done in and out of Vegas, a good airport absolutely can be designed, because that airport works damn well.

10

The idea isn’t mine, and I can’t speak on behalf of the author of the article, but I suppose the author’s response would be that missing the train that takes you from the terminal to the plane means you’re SOL, but that it is analogous to missing the closure of the gate at a conventional airport, in which case you’re just as SOL.

11

It’s worse. If a passenger doesn’t board an aircraft, their luggage has to be removed from it. (This is due to non-suicidal bombers.) So everyone gets delayed for one passenger missing the people mover.

12

Huh. That’s one of my least favorite airports. When I’ve used it I’ve seen massively long lines, and the actual facilities are …okay, and it’s even noisier than most airports because there are slot machines all over the place.

13

Every airport I’ve been to that has trains from the terminal to the gates, the trains leave every 3-5 minutes. If you miss one train, the next one is only a few minutes later. If that causes you to miss your flight, you were cutting it too close already.

14

Having watched my city try to build trains for most of the last decade, and kind of really screw that up, I can’t imagine sticking half an airport on either end of the train would be all that much easier. A few hundred yards of trains is a different order of magnitude than a few miles of train.

15

Isn’t this sort of what Dulles does?
My understanding is that this concept is considered a failure in the air transit biz.

16

I miss Tempelhof airport. And even Tegel. Those were cool and clever airports. Does anybody else remember them?

17

There seem to be a couple of ideas mixed together in the article and that leads to mixed comments here.

The so-called landside of an airport is everything outside of security. So outdoors that’s parking, rental cars, and road, highway, and rail links to the rest of the region and perhaps the whole country. And indoors the land-side contains the baggage and ticketing check-in areas, and security checkpoints for people departing on a flight. Plus domestic baggage claim for those arriving on a flight. Plus a small amount of food service, restrooms, and retail to support those people. Plus perhaps one or more on-premises hotels.

The so-called airside is everything past security. So there’s food and retail, waiting areas near each gate, and customs / immigration at least for inbound passengers connecting directly to outbound flights.

Finally there’s rampside where the airplanes park. And where all their support equipment and workers operate to cater, fuel, fix, handle checked baggage, etc. Plus perhaps aircraft maintenance hangars, aircraft storage areas, fuel farms, catering kitchens, cargo facilities, etc.

Last of all there’s the airfield itself, runways for takeoff/landing and taxiways to get between rampside & runways.


Given all that, what can we say about how to partition these components?

The airfield and the rampside need to be pretty close together. Aircraft wheels, brakes, and tires aren’t designed for long distance taxiing and overheating is a challenge if we’re talking more than a couple miles as is typical at large airports today. As well, time spent taxiing is traveling slowly in a vehicle that costs a lot per minute to operate. Minimizing low speed motion of high cost equipment is economically important.

Washington Dulles is an example of an airport that tried to separate landside, airside, and rampside. But just far enough apart to introduce the need for a lot of people-mover type equipment and extra staff manpower, without really delivering what that article was proposing, the ability to use a LOT more land broken up into different areas for different purposes.

If one was building a greenfield airport for a major city, you’d want to buy an area about 3 x 3 miles for the airfield and rampside, and 4 x 5 miles would be better. Ideally this would be very close to flat, and have no residential housing within several miles in any direction.

Your landside-airside complex also wants to be 1x2 to 2x3 miles across. The land doesn’t need to be as flat. You could site it 2 or 4 or 6 miles away from the rampside, but you’re going to pay a huge extra ongoing cost for secure mass short-interval transport between the two.

There are good reasons to put airside adjacent to rampside and interpose any long transport link just inside the landside security perimeter. The reason being that airside waiting areas need to be roughly proportional to the size of the airplane being loaded. So separating the two doesn’t let you decouple the size of the waiting area from the size of the jets but does add an additional transportation link. It sounds nice to have each departure gate 15 feet from the next so you’re not marching a mile between gates when connecting flights. But when each airplane holds 200 people, you’re not going to get two planeloads of folks to fit in the waiting space that’s only 15 feet wide per gate.

Atlanta (other than for Terminal T) is an example of this design where landside is seprate from airside/rampside that are closely coupled. They happened to put landside right near airside, but you could imagine it being 2 to 10 miles away pretty easily.


My bottom line: I see value in centralizing landside where possible. But overall the article proposes something that will be more expensive and less convenient for operators and for customers. It may well be the least bad solution in areas where the availability of land is bad. It might also be a way to re-architect an existing airport that’s out of space into two components by moving e.g. the airfield and rampside someplace else but leaving the existing terminal & landside right where it is and fully connected to the ground transport network, then couple the two complexes by appropriate secure rail links.

18

They did the reverse when they upgraded/rebuilt Chicago’s Midway International Airport in the early 2000s. The airport’s property is essentially landlocked (surrounded by residential and industrial areas) and originally everything sat in a one-square-mile plot of land.

In the rebuild, they moved the landside (ticketing, baggage claim, parking) across the street (to the east side of Cicero Avenue), while leaving everything else (airside, rampside, airfield) on the airport’s original property, connecting the two structures by a pedestrian walkway over Cicero. By freeing up more space on that original property, they were able to expand the airside/rampside (adding additional gates).

19

Las Vegas is largely an Origin & Destination (O&D) airport. It doesn’t have to deal with a lot of transfer passengers.

20

The US is one of the few places that has an open domestic baggage area. Virtually every other country that I’ve flown through has baggage in a secure area for arrivals.