Terminal Planning – Brief Overview

Part 1 – Jean-Christophe Dick

https://airport.consulting/terminal-planning-part1/

Post author:[email protected]
Post published:June 4, 2020
Post category:Terminal

Airports are often the first and the last impression

you will get of a city or even a country. It is therefore
vital that the impression is a positive one. Although
the airport environment is much larger than a
terminal building, often the whole airport experience
for a passenger hinges on their experience in the
terminal.

From a macro perspective, one way to delineate the

airport environment is by areas/facilities:

Landside: On-airport access roads, parking

structures/lots, car-rental facilities, public
transportation etc.
 Terminal: All the passenger terminals that process
passengers for departure and arrival.
Airfield: All the areas where aircraft operate when
on the ground, runways, taxiways, aprons etc.
Cargo facilities: facilities to handle cargo
operations.
General Aviation: Private aircraft aprons, hangars
and Fixed Base Operators (FBO, in essence a
private air terminal).
Support facilities: can include aircraft
maintenance, fuel farms, ground service
equipment, airport firefighting, police and
maintenance.
Airspace: Everything above the buildings and
ground.

We’re going to focus on the terminal aspect of the

airport in this article.

Terminal Configurations
Terminals come in all shapes and sizes, some
shapes so bizarre they defy definition. From a
Terminal Planners’ perspective an airport can be
broadly divided into three main areas:

Airside: Broadly considered to be the airfield where

aircraft operate, runways, taxiways aprons and
contiguous restricted areas including buildings.
Landside: Comprises mostly the publicly
accessible areas of the airport, consists mainly of
transportation and parking.
Terminal: The bridge between landside and airside,
the terminal is split between pre- and post-
security.

Terminals in general are divided into two main parts:

the processor and the concourse(s). The processor
is where the passenger enters and exits the terminal
from/to the landside, it’s where a passenger will
check-in, go through security and customs as well as
retrieve luggage. The concourse is where the
passenger will find holdrooms to wait in until the
flight is ready to board at the gate (also in the
concourse). Functions such as concessions (food &
beverage, duty free, etc…), lounges etc can be found
in either the processor and/or the concourse
depending on the design.

How the processor and concourses are arranged fall

into four broad categories (or a combination).

Linear:
The linear configuration is possibly the classic and
the simplest of designs, often found in small and
medium sized airports, it is easy to navigate and
operate up to a certain size. The processor is linked
to the concourse along the side opposite the vehicle
curb and aircraft are parked head-in perpendicular to
the concourse. A terminal with a linear configuration
can be expanded by lengthening the concourse or
processor on either side. A variant of the linear
concourse is the double loaded linear concourse
where aircraft are parked on both sides of the
concourse.

Pier:
The pier configuration, similar to the linear
configuration can be found usually in medium to
large sized airports. Usually an airport will have more
than one pier to handle aircraft. The concourse is
arranged usually perpendicular to the processor with
aircraft parked on either side of the pier (and around
the space permitting). Piers are usually arranged
either parallel to one another or spreading out like a
fan from the processor, narrowing as they approach
the processor or the processor connector.

Levels
When designing a terminal facility, the number of
levels a terminal will largely determine the cost of
construction as well the possibility of future
expansion. Small domestic airports can be a single
level facility whereas large airports will usually have
departures and the concourse on the upper level
with arrivals containing customs and baggage claim
on a lower level.
Many smaller regional or domestic airports have all
terminal functions located on one floor, the
simplicity of a single level terminal has numerous
cost benefits from a construction and operations
perspective. The downside can be difficulty
expanding the facility if demand grows significantly.

In practice, airports that ground load passengers

with airstairs or ADA compliant passenger ramps are
single level (ie. Long Beach Airport, Burbank Airport
or Phoenix Mesa Gateway) without a second level
concourse, this type of arrangement is the lowest
cost solution. Ground loading works well and is
generally appreciated by passengers as long as the
terminal is located in a year-round pleasant climate
environment. More hostile climatic environments
can degrade the passenger experience.

At a most basic level we can also categorize

terminals on whether they have a single level
roadway or dual level roadway split between
departures and arrivals. Airports with single level
roadways can have either a single level for
passenger traffic (additional smaller levels for
administration and other functions can be added) or
a dual level with check in and bag claim on the
ground level and then second level concourse for the
gates and holdrooms.

A major reason to have a second level concourse is

the ability to use passenger boarding bridges (PBB).
Due to the door height of an aircraft, PBBs usually
start from a certain height above the ground and
extend and rotate appropriately to form a bridge
between the terminal and an aircraft. Due to design
and regulatory (Americans with Disabilities Act)
requirements it is easier to have the PBB connection
point be located on a second level; though ground
level PBBs do exist, they are rare and limited in their
capabilities.

Why departures on top and arrivals

below?
The main driver for arrivals to be on the ground floor
has to do with baggage handling systems, they are
big, heavy and cumbersome, especially the bag
claim devices. It is easier for those systems to be
installed on the ground floor for installation as well
as maintenance if large components need to be
replaced. Additionally, the upper level will not need to
be reinforced for the additional weight of the claim
devices.

From a passenger perspective; departing

passengers are requested by an airline to often be at
airport hours ahead of their departure. They will
therefore stay longer at the airport than arriving
passengers who tend to stay the least amount of
time in the airport (unless you are an airport planner
and you stick around for some sick reason). The
upper level has more architectural opportunities to
make a longer stay at the airport more pleasant
including higher ceilings, natural light and better
airfield views.

Dwell time (time a vehicle is stopped) for vehicles

picking up passengers is on average higher than that
for vehicles dropping off departing passengers.
These longer dwell times translates into higher
curbside requirements (longer curbs or more lanes
or both). It is easier and cheaper to add lanes at
ground level than elevated lanes.

Birth of a Terminal:
Traditionally, airports in the United States are
encouraged by the FAA to have a Master Plan. A
Master Plan is usually a multi-year effort that in
essence charts the course for the entire airport
development over a period of time, usually up to
fifteen to twenty years, usually in five year
increments. Within the last two decades, more and
more terminal development projects have proceeded
without a Master Plan. The planning phases for a
new Terminal follow the same master planning
process, only focused narrowly on the Terminal.

A Master Plan or Terminal Development Plan will

first inventory the existing terminal facilities and
determine how many aircraft, passengers, vehicles
can use the terminal. A forecast will then be drawn
up to determine aircraft, passenger, cargo and
vehicular activity over the span of the planning
horizon. An analysis will help determine the
difference between what will be needed to meet
future passenger demand and what the existing
terminal, aprons, taxiways and runways can handle.

Once those facility requirements are drafted,

planners will put together different alternatives:
different terminal configurations and permutations.
Each one of these alternatives will be ranked
according to criteria agreed to by the major airport
stakeholders. One alternative will triumph over the
rest and be selected as the preferred alternative.

The preferred alternative will then proceed from a

planning stage to a design stage, where architects
design the terminal facility. The chosen design will
then be most likely value engineered to reduce costs
then moved on to the construction phase. During
construction, it is not uncommon for changes to the
design (change orders) to occur, most often
increasing costs.
The Plan can also set different dates for different
facility requirements, meaning that for example 5
years from now we will need a new Terminal to
handle 4 million new passengers, fifteen years from
now that terminal should be expanded to handle
eight million and so on.

The constant saying when designing a terminal

(though that may change with potential pandemic
mitigation design) is that “you don’t build a terminal
for Easter Sunday”. Simply put you don’t design a
terminal to the capacity requirements of the peak
day of travel, which in the United States is usually
Wednesday before Thanksgiving or Sunday after.
The idea is to build a Terminal that can handle traffic
while providing passengers with a good experience
during the peak day of the peak month (in the United
States this is often a day in July). This is why a
Terminal is packed and many times unpleasant on
Thanksgiving or Christmas. If the Terminal was built
to the same standards to meet passenger demand
for these holiday periods, a large part of the terminal
would be underutilized most of the year creating
costs for the airport and airlines and ultimately the
passenger.

One way that passenger experience can be

measured is using a metric called “Level of Service”,
this metric was introduced by the International Air
Transport Association (IATA) in its Airport Design
and Reference Manual (ADRM), though sometimes
largely subjective at times. This metric helps airport
operators, airlines and planners track how terminal
facilities are doing over a period of time and help
determine when and where improvements need to
be made.

Forces
When deciding to renovate or build terminal
facilities, it is important to list all the constraints and
opportunities as well as stakeholders, their concerns
and issues so as to fully understand the forces at
play. Involving stakeholders in decisions and getting
their buy-in from day one is essential to achieving a
positive outcome resulting in terminal development.
The simplified chart below can show which forces
are at play that pull or push terminal development, if
a terminal project is decided on some forces will
want to pull the size of terminal to be small or even
canceled, others will push it to be bigger.

Living Building:
Expandability/Scalability
Terminals are functional buildings, but in a way a
living one too. Most buildings built outside of an
airport retain that footprint and architecture until the
end of its useful life. The vast majority of terminals
will have different lives, be different buildings. What
may seem at first glance to be one building, may in
fact be a combination of multiple buildings
combined together over decades. Large airports are
expected to be operational almost 24/7, it would be
very difficult to close a terminal and rebuild a new
one in the same place as you would lose the
capacity of that terminal during its demolition and
the construction of its replacement, the easiest
solution is to graft on another section. While in short
and medium term this solution does function, the
result sometimes is a terminal that seems disjointed
for passengers, creating wayfinding issue, reduced
levels of service and differing maintenance
procedures and life cycles in different parts of the
building. One solution to “full-throttle” terminal
replacement is to build another “empty chair”
terminal that will serve to replace the capacity of a
terminal during its demolition and reconstruction.
Often this can be done by building a terminal that
meets future capacity requirements ahead of
schedule, in essence transferring the existing
demand requirements to a new facility while the
rebuilt facility will meet the future requirements
when it reopens.

Newer facilities usually include opportunities for

expansion built into the design. This can include
leaving undeveloped areas or easily re-devlopable
areas adjacent to a terminal that could be used for
terminal expansion in the future. A processor can
grow along the curb line and the some concourses
can be extended to add gates. The midfield satellite
concourse option is often chosen for terminal
capacity expansion as its construction has minimal
impact to existing facilities and space permitting
another parallel concourse can be added. This
concept was the design for Denver from day one and
LAX is opening its first satellite concourse since the
sixties in late 2020 (if you look at an aerial image of
LAX you can see the original satellites embedded in
the concourses in Terminals, 3 ,4 ,5 ,6 and 7, look for
the ovals). Zurich Klotten used the new Terminal E
Midfield Dock (Midfield Satellite) as an empty chair
when it closed and completely rebuilt Pier B.