AIRPORT II

This should have been my first blog on the subject, but in the heat of complaining about the Detroit airport I cut straight to the chase.

My first flight, in 1955, started at New York's Idlewild airport (now JFK) which, at the time was a long series of quonset huts. We arrived in Cleveland at an airport that had been built around 1927 and wasn't much larger than one of today's mcmansions. It was a square, brick building along the edge of the airfield. The fifties was a time of massive building of hotels, airports and the like and the style was steel and glass whose architects were I.M Pei, Eero Saarinen, Phillip Johnson and the like. Aviation was really beginning to take off (pun intended)and the need for planning from arrival by ground vehicle to takeoff became a priority.

One of the most inovative designs, ultimately used by Kansas City International and Dallas Fort Worth, was the semicircular terminal. In fact, the terminals were somewhat more than semi-circular, maybe about 230 degrees. The idea was to use the inside of the circle for vehicular traffic and the outside for air traffic. One could arrive by car and be at one's gate just across the hall, about 30 feet away. It seemed like a good idea but no one reckoned with the spate of hijackings which shook the country and necessitated security checks for all departing passengers. As it was impractical to have security at every gate, the dream of 30 feet from car to plane was subject to an unpleasant awakening. Another drawback of this system was that although it was convenient for passengers arriving by land it was a nightmare for those who used the airport as a transfer point from plane to plane. One could land up having to walk two miles with heavy luggage (before luggage wheels) from one gate to another.

Another idea which was more lately born puts an arrival building in midfield and a monorail leading to a landside terminal. This is evident in Florida airports, at Detroit and in Pittsburgh. I don't see the sense in this but they must have had a reason. It cuts down on the length of your walk although that isn't the case at Pittsburgh.

Getting from one gate or concourse to another is also an issue for intelligent airport design. Due to the growth of air travel, additions to airports are inevitable and they lead to a hodgepodge of different modes of movement between terminals and gates. Airport officials widen or extend a space and then find that it doesn't fit in to the original traffic flow at the airport and they engineer a solution which requires some convoluted movements to navigate it all. They use busses, monorails that don't fit in with existing tram systems, and moving walkways and escalators leading to the same problems they originally eliminated when conceptualising the new airport.

The best design would be a two level one with ticketing and gates on one level and baggage and ground services on another. Easy to say, but rather difficult to achieve.