"Halfway to the Future of Dulles Airport"

Wednesday, July 7, 2004

Halfway to the Future of Dulles Airport 
As Business Rebounds, Tour Highlights Progress on $3 Billion Expansion
Project 
By Steven Ginsberg
The Washington (DC) Post


The future of Dulles International Airport, which includes a train
circling the airport, new runways and gates and a cloud-kissing control
tower, looked like little more than piles of dirt and skeletal
construction yesterday as the $3 billion project neared the halfway
point. 

But passengers will start seeing dramatic changes as soon as
Thanksgiving, when a 1,000-foot moving sidewalk opens that will connect
the airport's main building to concourses A and B. The underground
passageway will allow travelers to walk -- or run frantically -- to
gates, freeing them from having to take the moon-unit-like mobile
lounges that have been shuttling passengers between the main building
and the midfield terminal since the airport opened in 1962. 

By 2009, an automated, underground train system, similar to ones in the
Atlanta and Denver airports, will provide another link between Dulles's
main building and the far-off ones where flights begin and end. Those
changes will relegate the mobile lounges to a secondary role, although
airport officials said they will not disappear entirely. 

The construction at Dulles comes at a time when all three Washington
area airports are returning to levels not seen since before the terror
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Baltimore-Washington International
Airport is undergoing a $1.8 billion expansion. 

"We're building Dulles for the demand we see in the future," said James
E. Bennett, president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Washington
Airports Authority, who took the media on a tour of the construction
yesterday. 

Activity at the airport yesterday included the reconstruction of one of
its three runways. The runway has been out of service since April and
has contributed to flight delays during the heavy summer season, but
airport officials said they plan to have it operating again by
mid-August when start-up Independence Air plans hundreds of additional
flights each day. 

A fourth runway is expected to open in 2008. And a 325-foot control
tower -- twice as tall as the existing one -- is slated for completion
in 2006. 

Expansion projects completed at Dulles include two new parking garages
that added 8,500 spaces. The garages have walkways to the terminal.
Underway are renovations of ticketing and baggage claim areas and
construction of more gates. 

Traffic at "Dulles is growing very rapidly," Bennett said. 

Airport officials said yesterday that traffic at Dulles increased 17
percent, from 16.8 million to 19.7 million passengers, in the 12 months
that ended in June 2004 from the same period a year earlier. They said
the number is expected to skyrocket in the next 12 months to 26.3
million passengers, based largely on the impact of Independence. 

Increased activity at Reagan National Airport has filled parking lots on
some days, and airport officials said the number of passengers is
expected to hit the 15 million mark this year -- about where it was
before the terrorist attacks. 

BWI officials said the airport reached pre-Sept. 11 levels last year and
has experienced a double-digit percentage increase in volume since then.


The $1.8 billion expansion of BWI will triple its parking capacity,
widen access roads and add more gates, terminals and services. Most of
the parking upgrades have been completed, and the terminal improvements
are scheduled to be finished by the summer of 2006. 

The billions of dollars in improvements underscore the importance of the
airports to Virginia and Maryland. Leaders in Virginia have linked the
booming economic development of the Dulles corridor directly to the
airport, and their counterparts in Maryland have said that expanding BWI
is critical to growing the state's business base and competing with the
Old Dominion. 

Expansion at Dulles began in 2000 and was reassessed after the
tremendous decline in air travel that followed the Sept. 11 attacks.
Planners decided to put off indefinitely work at concourses C and D and
construction of another concourse. They also scrapped plans for a train
connection to the international arrivals terminal. A walkway from the
main terminal to concourses C and D has also been delayed until they are
rebuilt. 

Nonetheless, the airport is rife with temporary changes. The airport has
moved the docking locations for mobile lounges, as well as screening
checkpoints and walkways. 

While excited about improvements at Dulles, many passengers are not
thrilled about the inconveniences of construction. 

"It looks like I'm going through a maze," said Naresh Rangwani, a
regular flier who landed on an early afternoon flight from Houston. "I'm
going up and down and up and down, and then some steps come back up. I
liked it the way it was before."


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