Airport plans to rebuild terminal and concourses
Passenger jets at Salt Lake City International Airport. The airport is planning to rebuild its terminal with two parallel concourses replacing the current horseshoe layout. The idea is to allow planes to come in from one side and exit the other, instead of having to back out and create traffic jams. More planes could move through more quickly. Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune
By Brandon Loomis
The Salt Lake Tribune
After years of dreaming, Salt Lake City is now planning for a complete makeover of its airport terminal.
The push for a more efficient Delta Air Lines Western hub is now undergoing an environmental study that will be ready for public review next summer. Likely a makeover costing hundreds of millions of dollars — city officials aren’t ready to project costs — the plan is meant to replace Salt Lake’s crescent-and-spokes layout with two parallel rows of concourses. The design, planners say, will enable planes to enter from one end and exit the other, eliminating many taxiway delays.
“You have to wait for planes to back up before you can come in,” airport spokeswoman Barbara Gann said, describing a pilot’s delay at today’s airport.
Changing that won’t be cheap or fast. Because the airlines and passengers will pay for it through fees, flying out of Salt Lake could cost a few dollars more. And if airline demand hits unforeseen turbulence the way it did after the 2001 terrorist attacks and the recent recession, the already delayed project could take longer than the projected decade or more.
It has already been a long time coming, according to Minneapolis-based travel industry analyst Terry Trippler.
“Salt Lake needs to upgrade the airport,” said Trippler, who recalls thinking the building was pretty cool — back when there was a Western Airlines and it took up residence at the gates here. “It will certainly increase the chances of Delta making it an even larger hub.”
That’s a reasonable expectation, Trippler said, because Salt Lake is Delta’s westernmost hub for domestic flights, and since the airline’s merger with Northwest it appears to have even more appetite for regional destinations.
Delta officials did not respond to requests for an interview or comments about a Salt Lake upgrade. But airport Executive Director Maureen Riley said Delta and the other airlines are partners in the planning.
“Any development of airport facilities will be accomplished with the support of the air carriers serving Salt Lake City,” she said.
Runways and flight patterns are not expected to change.
Detroit, another Delta hub after the Northwest merger, is an example of what a new terminal can do for an airport, Trippler said. A $1.2 billion, 97-gate terminal completed in 2002 enhanced Detroit’s status, he said, especially as an international hub. Unlike other major players such as Chicago’s O’Hare, travelers through Detroit Metropolitan can move from domestic flights to international flights without switching to a different terminal.
An additional terminal that opened with 24 gates in Detroit two years ago cost $431 million.
Salt Lake City currently has 83 gates, and likely would add only a handful, at least in initial phases of the redesign, because the goal is efficiency rather than size. Gann would not speculate how costs would compare to Detroit or other airports.
Like in Detroit, a key aspect of the redesign is a centralized terminal, easing movement between flights. The concourses then would spread perpendicularly from the terminal. Ultimately a second line of concourses would parallel the first, accessed by an underground tram.
Before the recent economic downturn, city officials had said they hoped to open a new terminal around mid-decade. Now, construction likely won’t begin until then, Gann said.
The airport’s annual flight traffic peaked in 2005 at 442,000, but dropped to 374,000 by last year. Besides the recession’s economic drain on passengers, Gann said, the number of flights declined as airlines used bigger aircraft on fewer runs. The airport served 20 million passengers last year, ranking it 22nd in the nation and 59th worldwide.
This year, based on national trends, the Federal Aviation Administration predicts Salt Lake will field just 368,000 flights, or about what it did in the mid-1990s. Longer-term projections, though, assume regional demand growth, building back to 438,000 by 2019.
But it isn’t just travel demand that drives the need, according to Gann. Most of the existing terminal footprint was completed between 1960 and the mid-1980s.
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What a beauty. 
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