After pandemic, Terminal A not going to fly

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 juryrigged 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.

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 worldclass 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