Airport Terminals

Authors: Dr. John Bowen and Dr. Jean-Paul Rodrigue

1. Airports: Global Reach, Local Impacts

The rapid expansion of air passengers and air freight flows (see Chapter 3, Concept 4) fostered by globalization has made everything about the world’s great airports bigger. They are bigger in the volumes of traffic they handle, their sizes and the distances that separate them from the cities they serve, their costs and economic impacts, their environmental consequences, and the political controversies they engender.

“By the year 2000 the airport terminal had become, strategically, the most important building type in the world.” (Pearman, 2004)

The very importance of airports globally has exacerbated the local conflicts they provoke. Indeed, a fundamental feature of airports is the degree to which they are embedded at several scales:

• Regional/National/Global. Airports are like pumps and valves in the circulatory system of the global economy. They mediate currents of people and goods. The importance of an airport in this regard is a function of its centrality and its intermediacy (Fleming and Hayuth, 1994). The former term refers to a node’s role as an origin and destination gateway to a surrounding region, and the latter term refers to the degree to which a node serves as an interchange between different regions. The most important airports enjoy either centrality within one of the world’s foremost city-regions, intermediacy among key markets, or both. The stretching of production linkages across the world has increased the importance of intermediacy on a global scale. For example, one factor propelling the growth of Dubai as an air transport hub is the fact with new ultra-long-range aircraft like the A340-500 any two locations on earth can be linked via a stop in Dubai.
• Local. Airports, especially large ones, are defining features of the communities in which they are set. A large airport generates thousands of jobs directly and thousands more via forward and backward linkages. A study of Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport (Hakfoort et al, 2001), for instance, estimated that 45,000 people were employed at the airport itself in the late 1990s and that for every person employed directly, two more were employed in the Greater Amsterdam Area by firms linked to the airport (e.g. tourist attractions). In the US, airports accounted for more than $500 billion of economic activity in 2001, including 1.9 million direct and 4.8 million indirect jobs (ACI, 2002). Airports are not just features of a community’s economic geography, however. An airport the size of Schipol is a critically important source of noise pollution and other local environmental effects, a voracious land use, and a signature piece of the built environment. Indeed, the newest big airport terminals feature extremely long roofs topped by spectacular architectural flourishes such as billowing white tent-like structures atop Denver International and the sweeping metallic swells at Osaka-Kansai.

Of course, the global and local cannot be looked at separately. One positive way in which they come together in the case of airports is the location of corporate headquarters. A number of studies have shown a pronounced tendency for headquarters to cluster in cities with good international air accessibility. There is a strong correlation, for instance, between the number of headquarters and the number of airline passengers in US metropolitan areas. To some degree, the link between accessibility and headquarters operations boils down to a chicken-and-egg question: does the concentration of headquarters jobs in a city generate the traffic that incites airlines to increase the number of flights there and the number of cities to which it is connected or does better air accessibility attract headquarters jobs? Of course, the relationship works in both directions; but at least one study (Ivy, Fik, and Malecki, 1995) found that the second direction (i.e. accessibility drawing jobs) was stronger. The success of cities such as Atlanta and Dallas in attracting headquarters from other, smaller cities (e.g. paper products manufacturer Kimberly-Clark moved from Neenah, Wisconsin to suburban Dallas) substantiates that finding. On the other hand, the articulation of airports at several scales creates the potential for significant conflict. In Chicago, the USD 7 billion O’Hare Modernization Program promises to significantly reduce delay in the US air transport system benefiting travelers from throughout the nation (and even internationally), but the costs will fall heavily on local residents, particularly those living in the 530 residences that will be torn down to make way for the airport’s new and realigned runways.

2. Airport Sites

O’Hare was opened after World War II, 24 kilometers from Chicago’s Loop at a site called Orchard Place (thus the famed three-letter code ORD, sometimes mistakenly thought to stand for “ordeal”). The site far from the hustle and bustle of downtown, seemingly afforded ample space for expansion and provided a good tradeoff between having a location close enough to the city center to provide easy access to the benefits associated with the airport but far enough away to reduce the negative externalities (e.g. noise impact) of the airport. But in the years since, Chicago-O’Hare, Toronto-Pearson, and other airports built on urban peripheries in the 1940s and 1950s have served as growth poles, drawing commercial, industrial as well as residential developments to those sectors of the city.

Suburbanization in general is one big reason it has become more difficult to place major airports with each passing decade. Local site requirements are extremely important for air terminals as its two major components, the airfields and the terminals. Airport site location involves a wide variety of considerations:

• Air transportation forecast demand. Forecasted demand strongly affects the number and length of runways and the size of airport terminals, and therefore the physical size of the airport itself. Larger aircraft generally require longer runways. For example, about 3,300 meters (10,000 feet) are required for a 747 to takeoff.
• Runway configuration. About 32 movements (landings and takeoffs) per hour are possible on a commercial runway under optimal conditions. However, where runways intersect, capacity is significantly reduced. Thus, the trend for the largest airports is to have parallel runways permitting simultaneous takeoffs and landings. Parallel runway configurations generally demand more space than crossing runways.
• Altitude. At higher altitude, a longer runway is required to achieve the same lift because the air density is lower.
• Meteorological conditions. Local variations in precipitation, prevailing wind, visibility, etc. must be taken in to account. Oakland’s less fogbound airport has gained some business, especially from low-cost carriers, at the expense of San Francisco International.
• Topography. The land upon which runways is built must be flat, with no more than a 1 percent slope. Hilly land can be flattened and swampy land filled, of course, but at a cost.
• Environmental considerations. Airports have significant effects on local waterways, wildlife, and air quality. An important aspect of London-Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 project is the diversion of two rivers around the site.
• Adjacent land uses. Concerns about noise and other airport impacts have encouraged the setting aside of buffer areas much larger than runways and the supporting terminals, taxiways, and other infrastructure would require. The new Denver International Airport, for instance, occupies a parcel of land twice the size of Manhattan. In other cases, such as Dun Huang in China, specific geographical constraints had to be respected, namely that the airport could not consume scarce agricultural land.
• Local accessibility. At the same time, however, an airport must be accessible to the communities it serves, making its location relative to highways and passenger rail lines (both intercity and metro) important. The integration of airports with passenger rail (e.g. Charles de Gaulle, Schipol, Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York) is intended to link the airport terminal with the regional market it serves, thus reinforcing its function as a pole in the regional economy.
• Obstructions. Beyond the airport perimeter, the proximity of mountains, hills, and/or heavily built-up areas (as in the case of Hong Kong’s old airport at Kai Tak) complicates airport operations. If approach corridors pass over residential zones, pressures can emerge to restrict operating hours.
• Other airports. Nearby airports, especially in the same metropolitan area, may limit the available airspace and constrain new airport operations.

The increasing physical size of airports and the difficulty of fitting in with neighboring land uses have encouraged the development of airports at increasingly remote locations. Indeed, the more recently an airport was constructed, the more likely it is to be located far from the center of the metropolitan area it services. In the most extreme cases, land has been reclaimed from the sea to make space for airports. Chek Lap Kok is likewise built on land reclaimed from the sea.

Asia is, in fact, home to several of the most extreme examples of airport “terraforming” (Fuller and Harley, 2004: 105). More distinctive that Kansai’s roof, for instance, is its location on a man-made island in Japan’s Inland Sea. The island, which was a prime contributor to the stratospheric cost of Kansai, is an extreme example of the lengths to which airport-builders have had to go to meet the spatial requirements of key hub airports. Overall, the four most expensive new airports in the world (Chek Lap Kok, Osaka-Kansai, Nagoya-Central Japan, and Seoul-Incheon) share three characteristics: their location in fast-growing Asia, the proximity to densely populated metropolitan areas, and their construction atop land reclaimed from the sea. The Asian airport building boom has a long way yet to run. In 2005, China had only 196 airports certified to handled transport aircraft. By comparison, the US had 14,000 such airports and Australia 444 (Thomas, 2005). India, too, is likely to require the construction of new airports.

Conversely, few new airports have been built in North America or Europe recently. In the US, Denver International is the only large airport to open in the past quarter century. Airports are political lightning rods, and the examples Denver illustrates how difficult and contentious such projects can be (Dempsey et al, 1997). The result has been that most airports have to adjust to their existing sites, by re-configuring runways and building new terminal, as for example in O’Hare and Heathrow. These projects have hardly been free of controversy, however, and are themselves very expensive.

3. Keeping Pace: Airports and Delay

Nevertheless, the expansion of air traffic ensures that the building of new runways, new terminals, and new airports will continue. The US Federal Aviation Administration estimates that six large American airports will require additional capacity beyond what is currently planned by 2015 and an additional eight airports will need fall short of required capacity by 2025. There are a variety of means other than new runways and terminals to meet the needs of the future, including better use of information technology to wrench more capacity out of the sky; but it seems inevitable that at many of these airports, the cranes and bulldozers will be put to work. In fact, the FAA suggests that four metropolitan areas in the US may each need new commercial airport by 2025: Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, and San Diego (FAA, 2007). Europe faces a similar dilemma. China probably represents the most acute situation. With a limited number of airports and a traffic doubling every four years, terminals are hard pressed to handle the air traffic. Some governmental restrictions for the number of flights and the creation of new services are even starting to be implemented by the Chinese government.

Failing to keep pace with demand will mean worsening congestion. As air traffic has again reached and now broken the records set before the September 11, 2001 attacks, delay in many parts of the global airline industry has worsened dramatically. Projects like the O’Hare Modernization Program will help but the lack of slack in many parts of the system (e.g. LaGuardia where almost every available takeoff and landing slot is scheduled for use) mean that there are many chokepoints from which delays can propagate. This has become a particular vulnerability within air transportation, particularly in systems strongly developed around the hub-and-spoke structure. Delays at highly congested hub airports quickly propagate within the whole system. For instance, if a congested airport is forced to shut down for a short period of time due to meteorological conditions (e.g. thunderstorm), delays increase exponentially. Once the airport reopen, the priority is to have the inbound flights that were waiting in standby patterns land (some may be getting low in fuel), which delays outbound flights. The outbound queue can become so substantial that gate access for inbound flights can be impaired, which again exacerbate delays since delayed inbound flights will become delayed (or cancelled) outbound flights.

4. Airlines and Airports

Much as the airline industry has been transformed by liberalization in recent decades, the airport business, too, has been buffeted by its own dramatic changes – some of them stemming from the airlines. A few decades ago most major airports and most major airlines were state-owned, run as public utilities, and somewhat insulated from competition. That is no longer the case in either industry. Although the airport business has changed to lesser degree as many are still managed by airport authorities, there are important instances of privatization and globalization. For instance BAA, which operates London’s three main airports and several others, is now owned by a Spanish construction company.

More importantly, airports compete more fiercely for business than in the past. In this regard, the rise of the low-cost carriers (LCCs) is important because one dimension of some LCCs’ business model is service via lower cost secondary airports. In Belgium, for instance, Ryanair and other LCCs have made Charleroi South Brussels Airport a real alternative gateway to the region surrounding the EU capital. By 2007, Ryanair served 25 destinations from Charleroi. The carrier was originally attracted to the airport by a variety of subsidies and other financial inducements from the local and regional government. While the European Commission later ruled that some of those arrangements violated European competition policy (Baker, 2004), the stakes are so high in attracting and retaining air services that governments are sure to continue to aggressively promote their airports.

Charleroi is hardly the only airport put on the map by an airline. This is particularly true in the air cargo business. The gigantic importance of Memphis and Louisville, for instance, in cargo flows is almost entirely attributable to the hubs operated there by FedEx and UPS, respectively. The benefits to the two cities have been enormous and so are the incentives for those cities to keep their hubs and for other cities to try to attract one. Memphis, for example, has become "America’s Distribution Center" as manufacturers and retailers have set up sophisticated warehousing operations there to take advantage of the hub (Lappin, 1996).

The catalytic effect of the FedEx hub upon the economic geography of Memphis is an example of "Fifth Wave of transportation infrastructure-induced development". In the first wave, a millennium ago and more, cities grew up around seaports, to take advantage of the low cost of transport by water. By the 17th century AD, a second wave drew new development deeper into continental interiors along rivers and canals, especially in Europe. The third wave fostered new geographies of development shaped by nascent railway networks. At a different scale of analysis, the automobile defined the fourth wave as development spread from city centers to suburban locations, including the environs of airports like O’Hare. In the Fifth Wave, airports have become engines for growth, along a nexus that can be referred as an "aerotropolis".