Las Vegas Adding A Terminal To McCarran Airport

As part of a $4 billion, 20-year master plan, Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport, the nation's fifth-busiest with a record 44.3 million passengers in 2005, is making major improvements, including constructing a new terminal and concourse.

Among the projects that comprise McCarran's Vision 2020 are the construction of the fourth and final wing of the D Gates Concourse, Terminal 3 and a C Gates security checkpoint and pedestrian bridge. The projects also include the opening of the McCarran Rent-A-Car Center, the installation of an inline baggage screening system using radio frequency identification technology and the remodeling of the central baggage claim.

"Business travelers and, in fact, all travelers will notice a difference at McCarran and will find that the airport has higher levels of convenience, with greater ease of movement throughout," said McCarran director of aviation Randall Walker. "For business travelers, greater convenience and speed at the airport can translate into time saved toward increased productivity at meetings and on calls," he said. As work proceeds, however, they may experience congestion on roads in and around the airport, he said.

Construction of the last wing of the D Gates concourse is scheduled to begin this fall. Now in the design stage, with work scheduled to be completed in the first quarter of 2008, Walker said, the fourth and final wing of the concourse will add eight gates to the existing 36 and boost the airport's total to 104.

"These will help a great deal, since we've had an undersized number of gates to number of passengers," Walker said. "We plan for 450,000 passengers per gate, per year to make the best use of existing resources and facilities in the face of high passenger volume," he said.

McCarran's other main building project and its last major capital improvement will be the construction of Terminal 3, due to begin in January and be completed in spring 2011. It will have 14 gates, eight for domestic traffic and six "swing" gates that can accommodate international flights. The new terminal will include its own central plant, roadway, parking garage, ticketing counters and baggage claim and will be connected to the D Gates, a distance of about 950 feet, by an automated, underground tram, Walker said.

"If we'd had our druthers, we would have preferred to build Terminal 3 before the fourth D Gates wing, because Terminal 3 will be a self-contained facility. Initially, we had planned to complete this project before the last wing of the D Gates to give us much-needed roadway, gate, baggage claim and parking capacity," he said.

"After 9/11, all major capital improvement projects were put on hold. Now that we've rebounded so quickly and are experiencing tremendous growth in passenger volume, we've elected to complete the fourth and final wing of the D Gates in advance of Terminal 3, because we can get the project completed more quickly than we could construct a brand new terminal building," Walker said.

The new McCarran Rent-A-Car Center, a consolidated rental car facility, will open on a 68-acre site just south of the airport later this year. Rental car companies will relocate here from Terminal 1 to operate from a new 110,000-sq.-ft., two-story building. The $123-million center will feature a three-story parking garage capable of storing up to 5,000 vehicles. McCarran will provide complimentary shuttle bus service to and from the center.

"With all of the companies in one central location, much-needed space will be created inside the terminal," Walker said.

That space will be remodeled into McCarran's central baggage claim area. "Once the car rental counters have been removed, we will reconfigure rather than rebuild the space to increase the baggage handling capacity and efficiency of Terminal 1," Walker said. Work is expected to be completed in about 18 months, he said.

In addition to relocating all car rental companies, eight of the 16 baggage carousels in Terminal 1 will double in size.

"Some carriers' baggage claims will be relocated but, as we change the model of how central baggage claim works, we'll be able to handle up to five flights at a time," Walker said.

Plans are underway to build 12 new security lanes to serve McCarran's C Gates. This project, expected to be completed sometime in 2007, is an 80,000-sq.-ft., two-story addition, including a pedestrian bridge, directly accessible from the airport's southernmost ticketing area now used by Southwest Airlines.

"It will allow passengers to move freely among McCarran's A, B and C concourses, without the hassle of going through more than one security checkpoint, and will ease congestion at security checkpoints," Walker said.

In a related security measure, McCarran is implementing an airportwide, $125-million, in-line baggage tracking system based on radio frequency identification technology.

"We'll be the first U.S. airport to be entirely RFID-equipped, which will incorporate explosive detection machines, now located throughout ticketing areas into a behind-the-scenes, automated baggage screening and conveyance system," Walker said.

The process will consist of more than four miles of conveyor belts and 70 RFID readers. These read a coded chip embedded in a standard International Air Transport Association baggage tag.

The chip contains the three-letter code for McCarran and a 10-digit number for the appropriate airline that routes bags to the correct flights. "The accuracy rate for the RFID tags is more than 99 percent compared to optical scanner technology, which averages 85 to 90 percent accuracy," Walker said.

Bags checked in offsite, using SpeedCheck Advance, McCarran's self-service check-in system, also will be screened by the inline procedure.

Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority director of customer experience Mark Haley said, "McCarran's new developments, such as SpeedCheck, currently available at The Venetian and the Las Vegas Convention Center, give corporate meeting attendees an opportunity to spend less time in line checking bags and more time getting down to business."

McCarran is rapidly approaching its physical limits, Walker said.

"When all of our improvements are completed, we will have built the airport to its maximum capacity, ultimately sustainable at 53 million passengers per year for about five years, before service suffers and before stressing the airport's support infrastructure, including terminals and runways," he said.

While development is intended to always match capacity to space, growth, such as new gates, does tax support infrastructure over time, Walker said.

"Las Vegas' hotels drive the airport's capacity. From hotel growth, we can easily project future numbers of visitors. We know, for example, that 10,000 new hotel rooms mean an additional 3.2 million visitors that year. According to the most recent LVCVA data, there are approximately 41,000 hotel or condo rooms scheduled for completion from 2006 to 2010," he said.

As McCarran continues to grow beyond practical limits, with passenger volume up 21 percent in just the past two years and faced with reaching maximum capacity, the only logical solution for Las Vegas, Walker said, is to build Ivanpah, a second major airport 25 miles south of Las Vegas on undeveloped land already owned by the Clark County Department of Aviation.

An expansion of McCarran, would have required the purchase of land for another runway at a cost of more than $1 billion and would have had social and environmental consequences, Walker said. Ivanpah will have a capacity of 35 million and is slated to open in 2017.

To critics who charge that Las Vegas and its airport are growing too quickly, Walker countered, "The airport continues to be a reflection of the community's growth. As the gateway for one of the world's most popular travel destinations, we want to ensure we provide the necessary aviation services and facilities to continue to support the economic development of the community we serve."