If I Were Going to Design an Airline Terminal Today ...

DFW AIRPORT - Sitting in a room in the DFW Grand Hyatt, looking out upon a sea of aviation and on toward the skyline of Dallas to the east, one turns to the thoughts of the day's events. This is a Peer Review Group meeting, a sort of 'lessons learned' from the folks at DFW to other interested parties about their $2.7 billion capital improvement program of the past seven years. It includes this hotel, which the DFW authority owns, and the new international/domestic Terminal D, as modern as a terminal gets. At such peer review meetings - hosted by Bill Fife of DMJM+Harris - attendees share their local projects, looking for input. The discussion turned to the concept of a mid-size commercial airport building a terminal from ground up, replacing an unrecoverable old facility. Bottom line is, it's an interesting time to be building a terminal that needs to serve as the window to the community for a couple of decades or more. There's an opportunity to have vision, or to totally miss the mark. So, from one who has never built, designed, choreographed, or managed an airport, the recommendation for such a project in today's environment is: Make it all common use. No individual ticketing counters. Direct all entry into a common area that processes ticketing and baggage check-in (in-line screening, of course). Once passengers get through screening, they're free to find their way, or spend money on concessions. Quite simple, actually, and a good guess on where the industry is going. Yet, for the mid-size commercial airport, resistance from the carriers causes a community to not take a gamble on the airport of tomorrow (which, of course, is what they are trying to build). While the days of airlines controlling airport decisions are quickly fading, it remains a gamble to go against the airlines' grain. For smaller communities, at least, it seems local control on airport utilization is becoming a necessity. Thanks for reading.