In the early months of 2020, Raleigh-Durham International Airport was working on plans to potentially double the size of its smaller terminal to relieve overcrowding and keep up with passenger growth that had far surpassed expectations.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, all but bringing air travel to a halt, and RDU set those and other expansion plans aside. Now the airport is full again, with the number of travelers exceeding pre-pandemic levels.
On Thursday, RDU’s governing board voted to revive the planning for expanding Terminal 1 and advance an ongoing effort to enlarge Terminal 2, which handles most passengers at the airport.
“It’s exciting for me to know that what we did today is going to change how RDU looks in the near future,” said Dickie Thompson, who represents Raleigh on the RDU Airport Authority. “We can mark this as a red letter day for RDU.”
Terminal 1 has nine gates and houses three airlines: Southwest, Avelo and Spirit. In 2020, RDU began to consider options for adding 7, 12 or 15 gates, along with changes to ticketing and baggage claim areas, security checkpoints and potentially the road and drop-off zone in front of the terminal.
On Thursday, the airport board approved a $3.5 million contract to help it determine what it wants to accomplish with a larger building and lay the groundwork. This phase of planning will result in conceptual designs and renderings and rough cost estimates by the end of 2024.
The airport’s long-range development plan completed in 2016, known as Vision 2040, anticipated that RDU would begin adding gates in the larger Terminal 2. Since then, passenger growth has far outstripped forecasts; more than 14.2 million travelers passed through RDU in 2019, a number the airport didn’t expect to reach until 2031 under Vision 2040.
But before it can add gates to Terminal 2, RDU must build a new runway west of the current one, which would then be converted into a taxiway. RDU hopes to get Federal Aviation Administration approval to begin building the new runway later this year, but it may be another decade before new gates can open in Terminal 2, said Delia Chi, RDU’s vice president of planning.
In the meantime, RDU might need to add gates to Terminal 1 to keep up with demand. Another goal, Chi said, would be to make the older Terminal 1 as nice as Terminal 2, which became the airport’s centerpiece when it opened in 2008.
“You guys have probably been in both terminals,” Chi told members of the Airport Authority on Thursday. “You can kind of see the differences right now in the level of service and the need to improve Terminal 1 to bring that up to where Terminal 2 is.”
Terminal 2 will get bigger
Terminal 2 has 36 gates, though planes can occupy no more than 33 at a time because of space constraints on the tarmac. RDU hopes to add another 20 gates by 2050 by extending both concourses and adding two piers in the middle.
None of that construction can begin until the new runway opens.
In the meantime, RDU is working to enlarge the ticketing hall, baggage claim area and other “landside” parts of the building, which have reached capacity even before the added gates. The airport expects to have preliminary designs for expanding the terminal later this summer.
Those plans will include:
▪ Increasing the baggage handling area and the number of baggage claim carousels from five to eight. Two of the carousels would primarily handle international flights but could be used for domestic flights during busy times.
▪ Increasing the capacity of the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint with new technology and by adding four new checkpoint lanes, for a total of 18.
▪ Enlarging the Customs and Border Protection facility for incoming international passengers. With more queuing space and additional kiosks, the airport hopes to increase capacity from 400 passengers per hour to 1,000.
▪ Adding two more sets of ticketing counters, bringing the total to five. Some airlines now share ticketing counters because all of them are occupied, said Bill Sandifer, RDU’s executive vice president and chief development officer.
“Frankly we are out of space, and the airlines need more,” Sandifer said.
Making these changes will mean expanding the building at both ends, said Jennifer Evangelist, project manager for RDU. That means expanding the big room that has come to symbolize the airport.
“This is very early concept design, but the design team is taking great care to respect the iconic architecture that we have here,” Evangelist said.
Big changes to the road coming as well
The Airport Authority also approved a $9.5 million contract for engineering work needed to realign the airport’s main street, John Brantley Boulevard, and demolish and replace two small parking decks closest to Terminal 2.
RDU plans to shift the boulevard to make room for a consolidated rental car complex or CONRAC at the north end of its larger parking decks. The CONRAC would allow people to walk to and from their rental cars rather than take a shuttle bus as they do now.
The boulevard would also be redesigned to separate traffic from the two terminals and reduce congestion in front of Terminal 2. That would involve building a bridge so traffic leaving Terminal 1 would pass under cars arriving at Terminal 2.
The airport also plans to eliminate the crosswalk where people now cross the drop-off lane in front of Terminal 2. A new tunnel under the roadways will lead from the baggage claim area to the parking deck and future rental car complex, while a new elevated walkway will cross John Brantley Boulevard into the main ticketing hall.
Meanwhile, part of the first level of the main parking deck will eventually be converted into a “ground transportation center,” where taxis, hotel shuttles, limos and rideshare companies such as Uber and Lyft will pick up and drop off passengers.
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