Denver Airport, the nation's fifth busiest, began a $3.5 billion, five-year renovation and expansion this summer. Airlines editor Robert Silk caught up with airport CEO Kim Day at the International Aviation Forecast Summit in Denver this month to discuss the project and how it will improve the passenger experience at what is already the newest major U.S. airport.
Kim Day
Q: How will you use the $3.5 billion?
A: We are totally redoing our terminal. We are consolidating ticket lobbies, relocating security, modifying all of the systems, the elevators, the escalators, the signage, all of that. We are creating a new post-security concession, retail, food and beverage area; a new meet-and-greet lounge in the plaza; and a new international meet-and-greet area. That's all in the terminal. We are doing 39 gate expansions in our three concourses. With all that, it raises the capacity of the terminal and the concourses to 80 million passengers a year. We are also going to expand and improve our entry road.
Q: What is capacity now?
A: The terminal was designed for 50 million passengers. So at 61.4 million, which we had last year, we feel the pinch, particularly on things like the train, which connects the terminal to the concourses. We are buying two new train sets, which will add capacity on that, as well.
Q: Construction began this summer. What impact will the work have on flyers?
A: What's really great about the gates is that nobody is going to know it's going on. You are just going to see a wall at the end of the concourse. Starting about mid-2020 into spring of 2021, we'll be bringing those gates on. The terminal is being done in four distinct phases, and after each one of those phases we are going to open up that phase. Right now, we're working on the first phase of the ticket lobby. In the spring of next year, we're going to open that ticket lobby, and then we'll move on to the second phase. So it's not like in four years we say, "Voila! It's finished." You're going to see incremental improvements.
Q: The security screening is going to be moved up a level?
A: Right, and right now we are doing the middle piece of the terminal. This is the worst construction you are going to see during the whole thing. I do want to say that we're not just moving security upstairs, we're changing what security looks like at our airport. We've been working with TSA to come up with a better mousetrap for security. You are never going to wait in lines of hundreds of people on a regular day. You are going to swipe your boarding pass and be assigned to what I'm calling a vestibule. Every two lanes have a vestibule in front of them. You'll wait with 35 to 40 people in the lines, so it's much better. And when you actually go through the lanes, we're going to use a system like Schiphol in Amsterdam, where if you or your bags beep, you're taken out of line. Everybody else keeps going through.
Q: You have this huge footprint. The Denver Airport property is 52 square miles. That makes growing capacity a little bit easier, right?
A: You could take Dallas/Fort Worth, LAX, Chicago O'Hare and Atlanta, put them all in our airport and we could still build an 18-hole golf course. That's how big we are. It makes the job a lot easier. First of all, most of our noise is heard only at the airport. So when we talk about the seventh runway, and you look at what Chicago had to do to build a runway, they had to buy land, they had to soundproof homes. They had to do, I think, a 15-year environmental study. We can, from start to finish, build a runway in three to four years. And then the comparative costs: Maybe it will cost us $450 million to build a runway that it took over $1 billion to build in Chicago. We can grow at incrementally lower costs, just because we have all that land.
Q: You're not using Passenger Facility Charges (PFC) -- federally authorized fees airports assess per ticket -- to do the project, right?
A: Our PFCs are already totally committed to paying off the original debt. We don't have the ability to assess PFCs.