I might be wrong, but I think the airport actually owns the farmland surrounding the airport, and leases it to the farmers. That was a deliberate decision to prevent that sort of development around the airport.
I know Sacramento’s airport does that, which gives them a big chunk of land in “reserve” that can never be developed and can be used to expand the airport in the future if necessary.
In Chicago, there’s been proposals (and some planning) for a third airport for decades, as both O’Hare and Midway have little room for growth. The site that was selected, way back in 2002, is in Peotone, about 40 miles south of downtown Chicago, and would be a true “greenfield” site, as most of the area is (or was) farmland.
The state has acquired a large amount of land at the site, and there are infrastructure plans in the works (such as road improvements, and development of a master plan), but progress has been very slow – both of the existing airports have undergone (or are undergoing) large-scale improvements in the last 20 years, and the major airlines have demonstrated little interest in serving a new, distant airport.
AIUI, DEN has a bunch more contiguous land controlled by the airport that is as yet unneeded and unbuilt. So they can grow both the landside and the airfield in place.
A quick look at Google “satellite” view shows ongoing encroachment by businesses. That’s going to happen, period. The question is how close do they get before they hit the airport land. And how much do people mind living with the noise? Folks love to whine about airport noise, but somehow those houses keep getting built and sold and lived in.
Very clever. I still wonder if there will be pressure to lease that land to businesses, which could become so established that they’ll have to be accommodated when the airport expands.
There’s always pressure. The question is which pressures get pushed back against and which pressures are acquiesced to.
Given that the local government tends to own airports, and the local government is also who gets money from sales and property taxes, they’re often the entity most keen to convert land from its current use to its “highest best use”, which is property-geekspeak for “most taxable use”.
Putting a factory or houses on what’s now leased to a farmer will almost certainly increase county and state tax revenue. Will they have the foresight not to do that, putting off that gratification in exchange for the later larger potential gratification of room to build a bigger airport more suited to their future population & demand? Maybe.
I haven’t flown out of LGA in a long time, but I’ve landed at JFK and then taken a door-to-door shuttle to LGA to pick up other passengers. The new terminal looks very nice and the Marine Air Terminal is still intact (and is also very nice).
I think they plan to overhaul JFK next. As long as I remember, JFK has been a weird airport, in that Pan Am had its own terminal building, TWA its own, etc., though there was one international terminal shared by a bunch of foreign carriers. And you’d have to take a shuttle bus between terminals. That’s unlike most other airports where the various airlines are in the same interconnected buildings and you can walk from one to another (though in some cases, it’s a long walk).
The “walk” at JFK is about 3 miles around the whole circle of terminals. Which is why they’re connected by a people mover / train. At least they have been for about 15 years now.
I can’t imagine any plausible rearrangement of JFK that produces a single gigantic terminal with all the airlines in it. It’s just too big and too many carriers have too many flights and gates for that.
I flew to New York about 20 years ago and deliberately chose Delta (I think) because they were operating out of the Marine Air Terminal. I found a big, circular room (probably the old main receiving hall) with a mural from old seaplane days. I love that era of aviation.
Logan is a little bit like that. Terminal A is almost exclusively Delta, Terminal B is mostly American, Terminal C is Jet Blue. There are walkways between them if you know where to look.
Kennedy is one of the few really big U.S. airports that I haven’t been through much. I changed planes there once, but didn’t have time to go outside the secure area. I know that the old TWA terminal was remodeled a while ago to include a 60s, jet-age retro hotel. I’m thinking of travelling to London this spring, and I’m thinking of going to the hotel, and then flying to London. Kennedy-to-Heathrow is practically the Oregon Trail of aviation.
Kansas City MCI – built in the early/mid 60s under a premise that you would drop off at the curb virtually outside your actual gate – a series of three 270-degree curved concourses where you’d drive up, get off, step in right onto your airline’s counter, then go past that straight into the passenger lounge for the gate, and baggage claim would be at the ends of the arc, all on the same level.
When checkpoints had to be added this did not go well. Some of the gates even had their own individual checkpoint since there was no way to get there from the next secure zone.
As described in Wikipedia:
TWA insisted on “Drive to Your Gate” with flight gates 75 feet (23 m) from the roadway
…
The terminals turned out to be unfriendly to the 747 since passengers spilled out of the gate area into the halls. When security checkpoints were added in the 1970s to stem hijackings, they were difficult and expensive to implement since security checkpoints had to be installed at each gate area rather than at a centralized area. As a result, passenger services were nonexistent downstream of the security checkpoint in the gate area. No restrooms were available, and shops, restaurants, newsstands, ATMs or any other passenger services were not available without exiting the secure area and being re-screened upon re-entry.Shortly after the airport opened, TWA asked that the terminals be rebuilt to address these issues. Kansas City, citing the massive cost overruns on a newly built airport to TWA specification, refused, prompting TWA to move its hub to St. Louis.
Gotta say, when I did travel there in the early 20teens it was kind of fascinating to see this kludgefest in action… Ah, TWA and their groovy terminal concepts. Gotta say the one at JFK was brilliant, admittedly had a “this was designed in the 1960s thinking of what they believed 2000 would be like” vibe but in a good way, and I’m glad JetBlue and the Ports Authority saved part of it.
SJU used to have the combination of baggage in its own “one-way-outbound” zone where you could only enter from airside and only exit to the curb, and your claim tags were checked on the way out. But the latter bit stopped years ago (after the AA hub there shut down) now it just uses the “one way flow” system.
And MCI is keeping their field but at the end of this month is replacing their 60s terminals with an entirely new “modern-conventional” land/air-side terminal, taking advantage of their huge land footprint.
I regularly flew into MCI in the early 2000s, both before and after 9/11, as I had a client in KC. I remember what a mess it became when they had to put in the more stringent checkpoints.
I had to make connections through Kansas City once. A memorably BAD experience. I had to walk THROUGH other crowded gate waiting areas to get around the facility. Finding a bathroom between flights that was within the secure area took effort; then waiting in line for the tiny lavatory with its single urinal and single toilet was hell. Available cuisine consisted of a food cart where I obtained packaged crackers and a bottle of water.
I was actually thinking about the people mover at JFK when I read the concept in the OP. Right now the people mover connects all the terminals landside, with each terminal having its own ticketing and baggage claim areas. The people mover also goes out to the remote parking lots and terminates at the Jamaica LIRR station. So if we wanted to implement the concept in the blog post the OP links to, perhaps build one big consolidated ticketing and baggage claim area in the parking lot or near the LIRR station (or both), and keep just airside stuff in the terminals, and the people mover carrying passengers between them.
Somewhat interesting article on Boston’s Logan Airport terminal E redesign. I’m not sure I really grasp what a 4th generation terminal is supposed to be.
How about putting most of the airport underground, with the airfield on top of it? It’d put everything close to everything else, with a small footprint, but it’d also make it tougher to build the field strong enough. Has that ever been tried?
I’m not sure how much space you would actually save that way. Regardless of whether the terminal buildings are above or underground, you’d need someplace for planes to park while passengers are boarding / deplaning. Or are you proposing having that part underground, too, like putting the ramp area in some giant underground parking garage?
Regardless, if an airport has more than one runway, those runways need to be a certain distance apart. So there’s going to to be some empty space between the runways no matter what. Might as well put terminal buildings and other passenger infrastructure in that space.
Yeah, you’d still need all the airfield. But you’d save all the space for the buildings.
Wouldn’t they be right in the path of destruction if there were a landing or takeoff accident?
There are lots of airports that put the terminal buildings, parking lots, etc, in between two runways. There are, IIRC, rules about about the distance between runways and buildings* which are meant to keep them out of danger in the event of such accidents. So I guess with that in mind, maybe you could put the runways a little bit closer together if you didn’t have terminal buildings there.
*Burbank being an exception with its terminal ridiculously close to the runway. As I understand it was “grandfathered” since it was built in the 1930s before such rules were in effect.
The USA has very very few major airports that were designed, as opposed to just happened back in the 1930then were expanded piecemeal between the 1940s and 1970s as time and money and political will permitted. Which changing political will NIMBYism has generally prohibited any growth anywhere since about the 1980s.
Off top of my head … ATL, LAX, DFW, PHX, kinda DEN, SLC, kinda ORD as now restructured, JFK, PIT, MIA, FLL, RDU, & TPA are all airports composed of parallel runways with the terminal in the middle. It’s got a lot of advantages. Any greenfield site airline airport anywhere in the world is built on that basic design. Some day maybe the USA will build another airport. But I doubt it.
As to semi-underground airports …
Interesting idea. The ramp areas where the planes park are vastly larger than the buildings full of people. Like 4x or 5x larger. So the maximum land savings if the buildings all disappeared is WAG 20-25%.
Car parking areas are another monster consumer of land. And for above-ground parking structures, they can’t get too tall lest they interfere with the clearances for the airfield. As well, extremely tall parking structures are inefficient at loading and unloading. Lots and lots of driving up and down ramps with few entrances and exits. Picture a structure you use frequently but now magically make it 15 stories tall. How well would filling and draining that thing work? Badly.
If car / bus exhaust was not an issue, nor was ground water, it would be interesting to put the car parking underground under the airfield. You would not need more than one, maaaybe two layers of car parking; airfields are vast compared to the number of cars that airfield can support as passengers. Then leave the terminal buildings aboveground as they are. People like their windows.
Emergency evacuation of underground structures full of masses of humanity is very difficult. Lots of people can’t climb stairs well, and escalators and elevators must be assumed to be inoperative.
In all, the “more underground” airport might not work too well. But it’s worth somebody with real expertise thinking about.
Kansas City just opened its brand new terminal, designed to take care of all the inefficiencies of the 1970s design. And what did they come up with?
A giant parking garage and passenger drop-off area which connect to
A giant common ticketing/check-in lobby, which leads to
A giant common TSA security area which funnels on to
Two long concourses
In other words, pretty much the same layout that almost every other airport uses. Aesthetically pleasing, lots of amenities for passengers, lots of local flavor to be sure. But nothing functionally novel or unique. And having flown into KCI more times than I can remember over the years, I assure you they have miles and miles of open land to have built any design they wanted.