Delta Air Line’s opened its first new concourse at LGA in November as part of its $4 billion terminal investment at the airport. Concourse G is 105,000 square feet, with seven gates, providing an array of new concessions options, amenities, technology and wider spaces to allow better circulation. Concourse G currently serves 60 flights per day for Delta with flights to Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
When completed, the new terminal will replace the existing Terminal C and D, allowing Delta to consolidate services in one building at LGA. The new terminal will have 37 gates across four concourses.
Ryan Marzullo, managing director of corporate real estate in New York for Delta, who is overseeing the airline’s LaGuardia project, said the improvements will modernize operations and provide gate flexibility for aircraft.
“Our focus was improving the experience and operations for our customers at LaGuardia,” he said. “To do that, we knew we had to make the facilities bigger and more importantly, the airside needed to be larger and more efficient.”
Delta was approached in 2015 by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey along with New York Gov. Andre Cuomo about upgrading its facilities after they announced the new Terminal B project at LGA. Marzullo said the airline seized the opportunity to modernize its facilities and provide more efficient operations while providing amenities travelers want.
“It’s really a simple design, focusing on getting dual taxiways to 33 of the 37 new gates, expansive holdrooms, better concessions and on the airside, consolidated and efficient passenger processing facilities and check in,” he said.
Delta’s operations are currently spread across three different concourses in two terminals at LGA. This means there are three different locations travelers can check in, three different areas they can claim bags and three security checkpoints.
“Going from two terminals to one and having a single check in, a single security checkpoint and single bag screening has efficiencies,” Marzullo said. “You can up staff or down staff as needed and it reduces the number of wrong terminal check ins.”
Concessions options include local brands and food options from New York chef driven restaurants. All seats include power for travelers as the airline anticipates travel needs.
Delta views LGA as a business traveler’s airport, so Mazullo said they put an emphasis on speed of getting through the terminal to allow travelers to access their gate fast.
“Looking everywhere that people enter our terminal, whether they come on a bus, or taxi, Uber, the future air train or park a car, we’re accepting them and taking their bags as soon as they enter the front door,” he said. “We’re not making them all go to a central check in area to drop their bag. We’re letting them drop their bags as soon as they get in the front door.”
Planners wanted flexibility in the terminal while designing it as efficiently as possible. They came to a set of tightly bracketed conclusions so they could provide electric vehicle charging for ground support equipment, so it’s available to Delta in the fuutre.
“One of our goals is to make it so any aircraft that Delta flies into LaGuardia smaller than an A321 can fit onto any gate on any concourse,” Marzullo said. “It’s giving us that flexibility so if we do see irregular operations at LaGuardia, we can move those aircrafts onto different gates with no problem.”
Pinched for space
LaGuardia is situated on a peninsula and bordered by the Grand Central Parkway at its entrance. This makes space extremely challenging for the project.
Martin Durney, Northeast aviation director, Burns & McDonnell, who serves as principal-in-charge for the LaGuardia Design Program, said project designers needed to look at the project and how to best address delays and gate restraints on the airside. That let them know how much space was left to build the physical terminal and headhouse while still improving the passenger experience.
“The biggest challenge here is land,” he said. “We’re locked on the north by the bay and we’re locked on the south by the Grand Central Parkway.”
Delta also tasked the team with working around current operations.
“The biggest challenge we have is with logistics,” Marzullo said. “We’re building on top of existing facilities and we made the decision going into this project that we were not going to degrade the operation. Its what’s out customers expect.”
All the planning meetings at the beginning of the project were with all stakeholders and figuring out how to make it all work. They planned for different needs while handling the logistics of materials delivery, construction areas and schedules to address challenges with ongoing operations.
“Where the new concourse sits today was actually a parking lot,” Durney said. “That was a great relief valve for the project because we could take ownership of that parking lot and start construction without a huge impact on ongoing operations.”
Durney said stakeholder meetings were key to the success of the project. Everyone had to buy in on the different aspects. LaGuardia is envisioned to be an integrated airport when completed, so planners needed to take a wholistic approach.
“That real estate constraint was something we just worked and worked and worked trying to get around,” he said. “There were multiple iterations on roadways and trying to coordinate with the ongoing construction at Terminal B, so we also had the LaGuardia Gateway Partners at the table for meetings to coordinate everything from deliveries to lay down areas and getting the roadways to all work.”
The first concourse completed on the new terminal is the furthest east, bordering the water. Durney said they began there because the parking lot only impacted Delta’s ground stand operations. It also allowed for micro-phasing of the project to work around aircraft movements and connection to existing buildings.
“We were moving aircraft around constantly,” he said. “As a design team, we were doing that analysis and moving the aircraft around until we could finally gain access when the concourse was finished to those gates and then we could slide what used to be hard stand operations over into those gates and have a little bit of breathing room.”
The new concourse is connected to the existing Terminal D. Durney said the team used a prefabricated structure to make the connection, which worked well.
Taxi lanes are being reconfigured as the team moves east-to-west on the project. As existing concourses are demolished, the next taxi lanes will follow in construction.
“There were so many gate restraints at Terminals C and D before the project began largely due to the single taxi lanes and the way gates were shoehorned into the building,” Durney said. “If you had an aircraft at one gate, sometimes you had restrictions on other gates, or sometimes you had closures at the other gates. All of that is getting eliminated with the layout we came up with.”
Durney said the team had to connect two departure levels at Terminals C and D in order to remove a “spaghetti network” of roads and ramps servicing the two terminals. They used a prefabricated bridge to connect the two departure levels straight across, which allowed workers to remove everything underneath.
“We’re doing the same thing on Terminal D, just coming from the ground approach,” Durney said.
Planners did a study on all the loads expected on the new buildings with available power and Durney said they realized the airport would be short on necessary electricty. They designed a 12-Megawatt substation, which was placed on the roof of the new concourse. Walls of the concourse are reinforced to meet the expectations of a substation that size and it will also provide redundant power source for the rest of the airport.
“We tried to take advantage of that construction and create the utility infrastructure that we would need to support the rest of the development so we could service the rest of the development from there,” he said.
Moving to the next level
The team will replace the Terminal C East Concourse in the next phase of the project, which will leapfrog over the existing Terminal D Concourse. Durney said the decision was made based on gate counts and how the team could move aircraft around to minimally impact traffic.
The third phase will build towards the east, with the final concourse built at the far western side of the terminal.
Marzullo said the team made changes as needed while addressing the complexities of the project. They’re focusing on making sure key personnel take more ownership of individual areas as they move forward to address issues.
“You have to treat this project as multiple micro-projects because they’re so complex,” Marzullo said. “We have to be a little more focused and making sure we’re holding ourselves and our contractors more accountable on delivery.”
The new concourse has larger gates meaning less aircraft can be parked next to the terminal as the older concourse is taken out of service. Marzullo said Delta will rely on more remote aircraft parking to address the constraint.
“Instead of having to take a bus to get to your aircraft, even though there’s a couple more hardstands, we can walk our customers out instead of having to board a bus,” he said.
For 2020, Dureny said the team is focused on construction of the headhouse and finalizing design of the next concourse. The schedule calls for 75 percent completion of the entire terminal by 2022. Total project completion is slated for 2026.
“This next concourse is right in the thick of the ongoing operations,” Durney said. “There will be challenges associated with that, but we’ve thought them out for a long time and very thoroughly so I think we will be in good shape.”
