The Wall Street Journal - 14.11.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Thursday, November 14, 2019 |R3

8%

of WSJ

readers

surveyed

named ATL

their favorite

airport. No

airport scored

higher.

Growing Pains of

Airport Expansion

An era of ‘perpetual construction’ can make every day

feel like the holiday rush; LAX takes drastic steps

17%

of WSJ

readers

surveyed

named LGA

their least-

favorite

airport.

BEST AIRPORTS 2019

has growth plans in place. Atlanta is probably not far from reaching

the point where it will have to start work on a sixth runway, he

says. The fifth runway took more than a decade to build.

Mr. Selden says the keys to airport growth without gridlock are

space and design. An airport needs land for expansion and a linear

design—long, straight terminals and multiple taxiways that let air-

planes move in both directions. (Denver’s design is much like At-

lanta’s.) When bad weather hits, tight spaces exacerbate problems

for airports.

The circular design found at New York Kennedy, Miami and

LAX lets people drive up to each terminal but doesn’t allow easy

room for growth. In addition, parallel runways are better than

crossing runways. Intersections mean one runway can’t be used

when the other has a plane on it.

Atlanta, which already has seven concourses, has acreage for

more when needed, Mr. Selden says. For now, the airport is ex-

panding with incremental steps. Five new TSA checkpoint lanes

will open next year, raising the total number to 32. Atlanta ranked

dead last among the 40 largest airports in TSA wait times in the

WSJ’s analysis. Five additional gates are under construction. The

airport is buying 14 trains to reduce the wait between trains to 90

seconds from 110 seconds. The airport’s five runways handle 2,700

flights a day. When Atlanta gets near 3,600 a day, it will begin the

process of building the sixth runway, Mr. Selden says.

Los Angeles

A

viation groups predict passenger traffic

will double in the next 20 years. What’s

left unsaid is how all those people will

fit into already crowded airports.

New airports are being built in

many parts of the world, from Istanbul

to Beijing to Sydney, Australia. But not

in the U.S., where the choice is to build

more gates and, very rarely, an addi-

tional runway.

Now airport executives debate a cu-

rious question that will affect our travels: Can an air-

port get too busy?

Even with new terminals and more bathrooms, can

an airport process so many passengers that efficiency

declines, airplane movement gridlocks even in good

weather, and crowds overwhelm curbs, security check-

points, baggage systems and gate-area seating? What

if every day becomes the day before Thanksgiving at

the airport?

“Most airports don’t stop” accepting passengers,

says John Selden, general manager of Hartsfield-Jack-

son Atlanta International Airport, and a veteran of

New York’s Kennedy Airport. “If you don’t have the in-

frastructure in place to support whatever number of

passengers you’re handling, you’re in trouble.”

Nowhere is that more apparent than Los Angeles

International Airport, the biggest U.S. airport for pas-

sengers who arrive and depart, not counting connect-

ing fliers.

At LAX, airlines and the airport operator, Los Ange-

les World Airports, are spending $14 billion to mod-

ernize facilities to try to relieve congestion while

packing in more passengers.

LAX, like some other airports, is a collection of ter-

minals built around one double-deck roadway, with one

level for departures and another for arrivals. Both are

so clogged it can take an hour just to drop someone off

after you enter the airport. (Pro tip: For departures, use

the lower arrivals level, which has slightly less traffic.)

So LAWA is building a 2¼-mile, nearly $4 billion ele-

vated people mover that will travel above neighborhood

streets to transport travelers to and from a remote

drop-off and pickup station—the airport calls it a new

front door. There will also be a new garage and a con-

solidated rental car facility. The people mover will have

six stations and be operational in 2023. It’s a bold move

to relieve congestion and give passengers certainty of

how long it will take to get between car and plane.

That’s just one piece of the massive expansion at

LAX. Two new terminals that would take LAX terminals

inland across Sepulveda Boulevard are under evalua-

tion—years away from construction, but possibly to

open before the 2028 Summer Olympics.

A new, 12-gate concourse

opens next summer in the mid-

dle of the airfield, linked to the

international terminal by an un-

derground tunnel. Existing ter-

minals are getting remodeled.

“We are in perpetual con-

struction,” says Deborah Flint,

chief executive of LAWA. “The

airport today is accommodating

more people than the infrastruc-

ture allows for.”

Ms. Flint says LAX has con-

sidered the question of whether

an airport can be too big, and

doesn’t have an answer. “It’s a

little bit of a mystery in the in-

dustry,” she says. “What airport

really stops growing?”

Size restrictions are in place

at the Burbank, Orange County

and Long Beach airports, which

aren’t part of LAWA. Years

back, LAWA pursued a strategy

of satellite airports as the solu-

tion for regional growth. But its

attempts to boost service in air-

ports it controlled

in Ontario, Calif.,

and Palmdale, Calif.,

56 and 71 miles

from LAX, respec-

tively, failed.

Traffic at LAX

kept growing—that’s

where passengers

wanted to go. Air-

lines kept expanding

there—carriers fight

most efforts to dis-

perse traffic to mul-

tiple airports be-

cause consolidated

traffic creates con-

necting opportuni-

ties, filling more

seats.

LAWA switched

strategies, gave local

control back to On-

tario and Palmdale and developed

a massive building plan for LAX.

For now, trusted traveler pro-

grams and new technologies have

sped up passenger screening and

border control checkpoints, re-

ducing long lines after a night-

mare summer in 2013. Just now

airports are rolling out facial rec-

ognition systems that will speed

up boarding airplanes.

“I don’t think anyone would

have said 20 or 30 years ago that

88 million [passengers a year]

could be accommodated on this

property as we do today,” Ms.

Flint says.

Ontario, on its own, is rapidly

growing under new leadership

and is expanding air service, in-

cluding a China Airlines flight to

Taipei. In September, the num-

ber of passengers at Ontario was

27% higher than September two

years earlier. The reality is ma-

jor cities need multiple airports.

Atlanta may be an exception,

for now. Mr. Selden says the

world’s busiest airport in terms of

local and connecting passengers

BYSCOTTMCCARTNEY

SameAirports,MorePeople

TraffickeepsclimbingatseveralmajorU.S.airports.

Departingpassengersbyairport

Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics

Note: Includes domestic and international passengers

20

30

40

50 million

2009 ’10 ’11 ’12 ’13 ’14 ’15 ’16 ’17 ’18

Atlanta

LosAngeles

ChicagoO'Hare

Dallas/FortWorth

Denver

FROM LEFT: LOS ANGELES WORLD AIRPORT; SHUTTERSTOCK

$472.24

The most

expensive

average

domestic

ticket among

midsize

airports, at

Washington

Dulles. It does

serve by far

the most

destinations

in that airport

group (143).

Los Angeles International Airport has started constructionof an elevated people mover, expected to cost nearly $4 billion.

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