Airport Design Takes Off

With global terrorism, environmental concerns, and increasing numbers of passengers, airports must change to meet new needs

by Helen Walters

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There's a memorable scene in the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie, Catch Me if You Can. Leonardo DiCaprio, as a Pan Am pilot, is striding through an airport, trailed by a bevy of skittish air hostesses. Their elegant uniforms, the refined atmosphere of the terminal, the general air of optimism—it all reflects a bygone time, a golden age of air travel, and a striking contrast to today's airport experience.

There are many reasons for the change, not least of which are two of the biggest issues of our time: fluctuating oil prices and the threat of global terrorism. The need for increased security checks not provided for within the original architectural design of airports has led to bottlenecks and retrofitting. Add to that, "People are going through security well in advance of their flights and this has an enormous effect on a facility," says Ron Steinert, principal at aviation architectural design specialist, Gensler, and a long-time observer of the industry.

In other words, more passengers checking more bags and waiting for longer means a need for more luggage storage, more seating, better food, and better entertainment and retail. "How many T-shirts or souvenir mugs do you really need to buy?" Steinert asks. "Passengers are looking for a broader variety of specialty retail—and asking for it to be street priced. So I can go to the airport and pay the same price for a Swarovski necklace for my wife as I would downtown. All of this takes space."

Major Delays

Many of those problems can only get worse. Take the number of travelers, which continues to rise exponentially. "Seven billion passengers will use the world's airports by 2020," Robert Aaronson, director general of the Airports Council International, said in December. "But given the current pace of construction and constraints on airport capacity, airports globally are likely to be equipped to handle only 6 billion passengers. A 1 billion shortfall in passenger capacity means extreme congestion, or turning away customers, at certain airports—a poor choice indeed for a vital industry," he added.

And the airport infrastructure is aging. In the U.S., Denver has the only major new airport to have been built in the past 30 years. In Europe, only Athens and Oslo built new airports in the last decade. Even terminal extension is a slow process. It took six years for Terminal Five at London's Heathrow to get the thumbs up, seven years for the approval of a second runway in Auckland, New Zealand. "In Narita, it took over a decade for a new runway, and when it was finally approved, it was too short for movements of any aircraft larger than a Boeing 767," says Aaronson.

"Everywhere but the U.S. has embraced either a privatization of airports or a public/private relationship where airports are companies set up to provide an airport—and the airlines fly there or not," says Steinert. "Elsewhere, airports are run as businesses and become self-supporting—and can make a profit. It's illegal to have a privatized airport in the U.S."

It's Just Business

A bill going to Congress in September, 2007, may change at least some of the funding mechanisms, with airports hoping that the current cap on the Passenger Facility Charges (a per ticket charge paid in addition to ticket tax which remains within the airport itself) will be lifted, or even removed altogether. "We need to take the funding of airport infrastructure out of the hands of airlines and put it into the hands of airports," says Steinert.

"There has been a real sea-change towards this. In the old days, the airlines thought of airports as a service industry that provided space to them and their passengers. Now, airports see airlines as providing a service to their customers. It's a total change in the way airports are looking at themselves. They're realizing that they have to run themselves as businesses, to make money and provide a high level of service, or passengers will go elsewhere. Take the East Coast of the U.S.: There's an airport virtually every 10 miles. If you don't like one, you'll go to another."