Perfect example. Thank you. The point is they “bought” additional space by splitting the total facility into two parts and adding transport links between.
The good news was the links were just pedestrian overpasses. Which were enabled by them being able to buy that land directly across Cicero from the existing terminals. If the nearest available land had been 2 miles away, they could have put landside there instead but would’ve needed to add a secure people mover or something between them.
Don’t think so. The only airport I’ve been to that sticks out to me is Schiphol in Amsterdam. All the rest are fairly interchangeable to me.
Well, as the security checkpoint is still on the original property (i.e., the west side of Cicero), if they had to build the new landside some distance away, I’m not sure that it would have needed to be secure transport. But, yeah, that transit link would probably have become the airport’s weak link, from a reliability and passenger satisfaction standpoint.
I think the OP’s cited article gets something else really wrong.
At Heathrow the airfield is far too small. The terminal complex is also too small, but only a little. And is already very well-connected to road & rail infrastructure.
IMO rather than building T5 off to the west someplace and having to connect that new someplace to road and rail, they should have built a whole new rampside/airfield out there. But just a rampside/airfield connected to the existing landside / airside terminal infrastructure by dedicated secure rail. Then shut down Heathrow’s runways and expand the existing landside and airside as needed within the footprint of current Heathrow. Which would easily multiply the available land there by 50 to 100% without expanding an inch into the surrounding towns / suburbia.
Meanwhile the new airfield can be built as big as they need. 5 spacious runways or whatever, not just two cramped ones as they’re stuck with now.
Botton line point being, even if the OP’s article represents a good idea, the proponent’s example is a misapplication of their own idea. Not good.
Of course, baggage claim has to be outside security - or only allow you a direct path to outside once you have your bag. Otherwise, contraband (knife, or firearm in the USA) could be retrieved from luggage on arrival and passed to another passenger outbound. So baggage claim would have to be land-side. You can’t have landed passengers with retrieved luggage using the same people mover to landside as the boarding passengers use to get to airside. (Or, search the people mover after every trip…)
The only other solution is to transport luggage from the arriving flight to landside before it is picked up. You thought luggage took a long time before, wait until it has to be loaded on a train and moved a few miles. Plus all the extra handling, with the opportunity to damage it loading and offloading multiple times.
This suggests to me it is not efficient to separate airside and landside.
Were those the “mobile lounges” that were touted back in the day? I believe they were in use at Dulles in the 1970s – they could be seen in Airport '75, and from what the film showed, they were little more than glorified buses, taking passengers from the airside terminal to the aircraft, then using a scissor lift to raise the mobile lounge to the aircraft door. They looked horribly inefficient, even back then.
You’ve described Montreal Mirabel (YMX). Lots of land, lots of room for landside operations, lots of efficiency as a result, and absolutely sucked for changing flights to Canadian domestic destinations, and US destinations, never mind getting to Montreal.
It’s an hour by car from Mirabel to Montreal (I’ve driven it), and that taxi fare adds up fast. The train line between the city and the airport was never built, leaving taxis as the only alternative. If you’re connecting from, say, London LHR to Calgary YYC, when YMX was only one of two gateways for overseas flights to eastern Canada (Toronto, YYZ, being the other one) good luck getting your luggage in YYC. Because you not only had to go from YMX to YUL (Dorval) for your Canadian domestic flight, but your luggage did too. And it didn’t always.
Things changed. Now, you can get from LHR to YYC in a single flight, and bar codes mean that your luggage is tracked. But most importantly, Mirabel is closed to passenger traffic. Everything now goes through YUL, and plans for Pickering (Toronto’s answer to Mirabel) have been permanently shelved. And most flights from Europe go through YYZ anyway.
If this were a snowy location you have substantially increased the area needing snow removal during winter. Not only a very much larger area to keep clear, but dramatically increased costs to do so, I should think.There would often be times when they would be facing continuous snow removal conditions. The more area you remove snow from, the larger area you need to push that snow to, you’d need additional space to accommodate that as well.
It’s one thing if you’re building from scratch, of course. But in most places you’d face big problems trying to sufficiently expand existing airports where things are already built up.
I suspect we’re all talking past one another.
Baggage claim for arrivals has to be outside the security cordon that applies to departing passengers being screened for weapons. For all the reasons @md-2000 said.
But that same baggage claim can also be walled off from the general public who might drive up to the curb. Thereby preventing random thieves from pulling up, entering bag claim, grabbing a suitcase at random, then driving off.
At most US airports this last form of security is not done. In general, at US airports anyone can walk up to the baggage carousels, grab any bag they want, and leave. Some US airports have a few “greeters” standing around watching the proceedings and will ask at least some people picking up bags to match their claim checks with the luggage tags. But that is pretty desultory at best and is pretty rarely deployed in general.
I’m going to bet that @FinsToTheLeft is talking about this latter situation which in other countries may be done more with walls, one-way exits, and other physical barriers than with half-assed claim check matching.
The other thing @FinsToTheLeft may be talking about is international arrivals. Which involve both immigration and customs and inspections on top of any security inspections.
The typical process when arriving internationally whether into the US or into Country X, is to first meet with an immigration official who’ll inspect your passport, visa, any immigration form they require arriving people to fill out, then stick all that info in their computer.
Assuming you pass that filter, you’ll move to a secure baggage claim area. But that movement is one-way; you’re not able to get back to the departure lounges from there. And nobody from the insecure public side of the airport can get into here either.
Once you have your checked baggage, then you, your checked baggage, and your carry-on baggage proceed to customs inspection. Where another official will “inspect” your possessions. And maybe all your paperwork again. With widely varying degrees of diligence, suspicion, and thoroughness.
Assuming you pass that scrutiny, you and all your possessions pass through another one-way exit into the general public area of that airport and can now mingle with the general populace of the country. But up to that point nobody of the general public can get back to where you and your baggage have been.
To be sure, there’s lots of local and regional variation in these processes.
Sometimes there’s a (usually desultory) security check after customs before you get into the general public. As in all baggage X-rayed, but only rather insensitive metal detectors for people, and maybe not even that. etc. I guess they’re looking for gun smugglers.
Sometimes there’s different screening and different movement flows for passengers just transiting through this airport in country X on the way from country A to country B. The various passport free zones for nationals of some countries but not all, such as Schengen in Europe, add more wrinkles to the mix.
But the bottom line is there are different sorts of “security” we can be talking about, and different levels of segregation of different flows of people and their possessions as they move through an airport whether departing, arriving, or both.
When they take the luggage off a plane, it gets loaded onto a train of baggage carts, driven a couple hundred yards, and loaded onto a conveyor that takes it to the carousel. In the proposal under discussion, that couple hundred yards would now be a couple miles. Maybe they’d need something other than today’s baggage tugs to haul things that distance, I don’t know. Every time a bag is handled is a chance for it to break or get lost.
The thing is, some airports already have some kind of link between landside and airside; an underground walkway, moving sidewalk, or train. I’m trying to think of this as just extending those links. It might not be ideal, but it doesn’t seem completely impossible, either.
I flew to Dulles once when they were still using the lounges as originally designed. I think the idea was that they could build a smaller terminal. In a typical airport, the planes park wingtip-to-wingtip, so the gates have to be a couple hundred feet apart. With the lounges, they could put the gates closer together; smaller building, lower construction costs, shorter walks for the passengers.
Last time I was there (and it has been years), they’ve gone to the more traditional approach; a long, thin satellite terminal with gates and jet bridges, and using the mobile lounges as shuttles between landside and the satellite.
Correct, this is what I was referring to.
Denver has a terminal and three separate concourses (A, B, and C). A train takes passengers between all of these destinations, and a pedestrian bridge also connects the terminal with concourse A, for those who don’t mind a 1/4-mile walk. They must have a backup plan for if/when the train is out of commission, but I wonder what it is. The security setup feeds passengers to a subterranean train platform at the center of the terminal building. If they need to use busses instead, I wonder how they’ll manage that? Does the train platform have a little-noticed passageway that leads to a bus boarding area?
Was the Denver Airport the most recent major new airport built from scratch in the US?
LaGuardia was reportedly rebuilt from scratch and only re-opened last year:
But they didn’t rebuild the airside, did they? I assume DIA included new runways from scratch as well. They had a blank slate.
That’s my understanding, as well. There was no existing airport in that location prior to its construction; the airport it replaced (Stapleton) was miles away from the location.
I hope they kept the historic part of the Marine Air Terminal.
AFAIK, just the terminal was rebuilt. The airport wasn’t relocated, so there wasn’t a need to rebuild the airside - and even if they had wanted to, there wasn’t really any spare land on which to space things out. Contrast that with Denver, which decommissioned the Stapleton site entirely (due to runways being too close together, no room for expansion, noise issues, and other matters) and laid their new airport out on a 6-mile-square parcel of farmland far east of downtown Denver.
Both are closed now (our politicians are inept too). Berlin Tegel Airport had famously short walking distances:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Airport_map_TXL_EN.svg
If it does not show, click on the link and please note that the passangers were let off the cars or taxis or busses (no U-Bahn, did I mention our politicians are inept?) inside the hexagon and you only had to walk about 15 meters to check in, and further 20 to the planes.
Tempelhof was magic, it looked like out of a comic book of Hergé:
There is even one picture of the Brussels Airlines BAe 146 I used to take in that page! (About half way down!). It was in the center of the Citiy of Berlin (West), it took me 5 minutes / 7 Deutsche Mark to go there by taxi! They closed it in 2008 because our politicians are not only inept, but corrupt too. The whole history of that airport, from the beginnings over the appropriation by the nazis and then the airlift during the Berlin blocade and the civilian use until it was closed is fascinating, if you are into that kind of history.
Our current airport, Willy Brand Berlin Brandenburg Airport, is a PIA. Expensive, unreliable, far away, ugly, uncomfortable. And completely soulless, could be any airport in any city. Yes, I really miss Tegel and Tempelhof, such airports will never be built again, I am afraid.
LGA was a comprehensive replacement of the main terminals, parking, roadways etc. And negligible change to the operating airfield. The current overhead view on Google maps is about 9 months out of date, whereas Bing maps is older yet, maybe 18 months. The old Marine Air Terminal building still exists on the far side of the airfield from the main terminal and supports some shuttle flights by one of the express carriers.
The current Denver airport was the last true greenfield airport in the USA, rising from scratch on what had been ranchland and scrub brush miles and miles from anything. And is broadly designed like Atlanta, where there is a single consolidated landside with a dedicated train system connecting that to a remote combined airside, rampside, and airfield. There’s no large distance between the two separate components because there was no need for that. They were able to buy a single contiguous area of land big enough for the whole thing.
Big enough for now, but in 50 years? If history is anything to go by, the airport will be surrounded by hotels and other businesses, maybe even residential neighborhoods. As passenger numbers continue to grow, someday the airport will want to expand, and won’t be able to. They’ll need to find some creative solution to the lack of space, like building a new landside terminal a couple miles away.