San Antonio's Terminal A was 'Built in Another World' and Looks It
When travelers feel safe enough to start flying again in big numbers, Terminal A at San Antonio International Airport will greet them as it always has — with all the fanfare of a kazoo band.
There’s a lot to dislike about Terminal A, the arrival and departure point for all but one airline serving San Antonio.
Pre-COVID-19, the place was packed with passengers during peak flying times. You could barely see the shiny terrazzo floor for all the travelers. At a width of 70 feet, Terminal A’s concourse is one of the dinkiest in the country for an airport its size.
Its length isn’t exactly a point of civic pride either, squeezing in as it does a mere 17 gates.
And as a consultant’s report noted in 2018, the 36-year-old Terminal A is plagued by “many functional deficiencies,” including too few “toilet fixtures for women.”
John Dickson has a thought on what to do about the terminal: Tear it down and try again.
He’s chairman of the Airport System Development Committee, which is hammering out a 20-year master plan for San Antonio International and Stinson Municipal Airport, a general-aviation facility. Mayor Ron Nirenberg appointed the group’s 21 members in early 2018.
The committee was just starting phase two of its work — the hard part, actually fleshing out the plan — when the pandemic hit in March, bringing the process to a standstill.
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When the planning starts again in the next few months, Dickson thinks a majority of the members would support replacing Terminal A. But he’s not ready to say that’ll be the plan’s big ticket item. A third terminal is also a possibility.
“We are still waiting for the dust to settle to determine what a post-COVID-19 world looks like,” said Dickson, a co-owner of the cybersecurity firm Denim Group. “However, there’s a strong sense from the committee that the energies will be focused on a new terminal. The timeline, cost and scope are still out in the future.”
Still, there’s no denying that Terminal A is a white elephant.
“Terminal A has reached the end of its effective use,” Dickson said. “And cities compete on terminals.”
Officials have basically jury-rigged the terminal for the last 20 years, he added. Six years ago, the city completed $35 million worth of renovations to spruce it up.
Dickson is pragmatic, not given to brooding on the past. But there’s a dark history here, a mashup of feelings of betrayal and the fear that San Antonio doesn’t measure up to other big cities.
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Business leaders and elected officials have engaged in endless hand-wringing over San Antonio International’s shortcomings — its lack of direct flights to key destinations such as Boston and Washington, D.C., as well as the blandness and inadequacy of its terminals — since at least 2008. That’s when Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T, moved the telecommunications giant’s headquarters from San Antonio to Dallas.
It was a trauma we never got over. AT&T’s relocation said, or at least we heard, that San Antonio was too much of a business backwater to sustain a world-class corporation.
Stephenson’s specific complaint? The airport. In his view, as reported by KENS5, Dallas was home to “more convenient, time efficient, and cost effective airports” — Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Love Field.
Hence the hard stares at San Antonio International. If Stephenson had said San Antonio had too few car washes, a city task force would be at work figuring out how to bring more Rub-A-Dubs to town.
Frustration with the airport’s unremarkable midtier status has pushed some leaders to extremes. How about moving the facility to a less landlocked location? Or how about working around the airport, which is to say diminishing it, by teaming up with Austin officials to build a regional airport like DFW?
Nearly a year ago, Dickson’s committee shrugged off the possibility of relocating the airport, concluding that the 2,600-acre San Antonio International has enough room to grow.
A regional airport had been a hot topic here, but not in Austin. Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, with direct flights to London, Paris and Frankfurt, and strong passenger growth, is doing just fine without San Antonio.
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San Antonio’s air service has unquestionably fallen behind Austin’s. But let’s give our little airport its due. About 10.4 million passengers passed through the facility in 2019, a 1.4 percent increase over the previous year. It was the 10th consecutive year of growth. Not too shabby.
The pandemic, of course, is bashing every airport in the country, and nobody knows how soon they’ll recover.
Last month at City Council, Steve Niven of St. Mary’s University and another economist sketched out several scenarios for San Antonio International. Under the “optimistic” one, this year will see 35 percent fewer passengers than last year, and growth will pick up again in 2022 with a 7 percent increase over 2019. The pessimistic scenario: a 66 percent plunge in 2020, with growth not resuming until 2024.
San Antonio’s aviation director, Jesus Saenz Jr., arrived here in February, just ahead of the coronavirus. Talk about unfortunate timing. The city hired him away from the Houston Airport System, where he was chief operating officer and deeply involved in the operations of Hobby and Bush Intercontinental airports.
Saenz is far more circumspect than Dickson about Terminal A and its potential fate. Its concourse, he said, “is one of the areas we’re looking at in the strategic plan.”
In addition to establishing social distancing and sanitization procedures at the airport, including putting a virus-zapping Xenex robot on patrol, Saenz said his staff is “working feverishly on air service” — trying to line up more direct flights to other cities and increasing service to Mexico.
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As far as landing a nonstop flight to western Europe anytime soon, he said: “We were certainly trending in that direction pre-COVID.”
Increasing the number of gates is also a high priority. All told, the airport has 24; before Saenz’s arrival, airport officials had set a goal of at least 35 gates to meet future demand.
Getting there could come down to rebuilding Terminal A with a bigger footprint or putting up Terminal C. Either one would be a hugely expensive, once-in-a-generation project.
A decade ago, a city-funded air service improvement study concluded: “A new terminal — Terminal C — will be required to meet 2030 demand.” It recommended starting construction around 2022, putting the cost of the new facility at $334.5 million. (Think at least three times that amount.)
The plan, called Vision 2050, also called for renovating, expanding and “relifing” Terminal A.
It didn’t have much life to begin with.
City officials dreamed up Terminal A in 1975 as part of a master plan for the airport — a humble dream for a poor, largely inward-looking city. The facility opened to the public in 1984, all 360,000 square feet of it.
“Obviously, it was built in another world,” Dickson said. “We want to create a terminal experience that reflects San Antonio.”
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