McCarran Airport Demand Spurs Building, Renovating
Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport earlier this year unveiled a handful of facility improvements and newly constructed offerings and announced the reshuffling of a spate of scheduled initiatives, all in response to a significant upswing in passenger traffic and officials' expectation of further demand.
McCarran this spring unveiled the new 140,000-sq.-ft. northeast wing of its D-gate satellite concourse, which houses 11 aircraft gates and several restaurants and concession stands. In June, the airport added two additional security checkpoint lanes, bringing the total at its A and B gates to nine.
Those projects are a prelude to 16 planned major construction initiatives McCarran officials included in a revised master capital plan, the schedule of which they altered to accommodate demand.
The planned projects, which have been approved by the Clark County, Nev., board of commissioners, include the construction of a new terminal and air traffic control tower, a consolidated rental car facility and a pedestrian bridge linking concourses B and C and improvements to airport runways, taxiways and roadways.
The plans in total cost $2.4 billion.
About 41.5 million passengers used McCarran International in 2004, a year in which the airport set several monthly passenger-traffic records, and the improvements are necessary to ensure the airport can handle still more passengers, officials said.
"Statistics have historically shown that passenger demand continues to be linked with hotel room inventory," said Clark County department of aviation director Randall Walker in a statement. "Last year, McCarran hosted nearly 41.5 million and the airport can process up to another 12 million passengers, if, and only if, we construct our final build-out plan."
Full construction of each planned project would enable McCarran by 2011 to annually host up to 53 million passengers.
Meanwhile, the $125 million D-gate expansion, which debuted this spring, includes a 160-ft. ramp control tower that officials said will allow controllers more flexibility to efficiently process the movement of airplanes in and out of gates. Controllers in the tower are responsible for all D-gate aircraft and cargo planes.
The project began in 2000, but was suspended following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as passenger demand dropped sharply. As demand rebounded, construction resumed.
"We currently manage $2.6 billion worth of construction projects for the sole purpose of meeting the demands of growth. Predicting passenger counts and when to expand airport facilities is not easy to accomplish, but it's being done," Walker said. "Additional capacity is critical and each of the new 11 gates will accommodate up to 450,000 passengers a year."
The two new security checkpoint lanes at McCarran's A and B gates cost $89,000. Officials said that the nine security lanes, if fully staffed, could handle 25,000 passengers per day, enough to meet the 14,000 daily passengers that would pass through the lanes if those gates' carriers averaged 80 percent load factors.
"McCarran is experiencing a tremendous amount of growth and with the addition of two lanes, the airport will be able to process more passengers during peak times at the A/B gates," Walker said. "We are doing as much as we can to make the process more efficient for our travelers."