Huge changes are coming to the Pittsburgh airport
Pittsburgh has unveiled a $1.1 billion modernization plan that would give the city’s resurgent airport a stunning new 51gate terminal.
The plan includes a new “landside” terminal where passengers would arrive to the airport and proceed to a modern check-in concourse. There also would be a new security area and baggageclaim system.
Further, the update would eliminate the need for the “people mover” train Pittsburgh passengers currently must use to go between the existing “landside” and “airside” terminals. The latter is the post-security terminal that’s home to most of Pittsburgh’s boarding gates as well as its beloved “Airmall” shopping area.
Renderings released by the airport show the new landside terminal would be blended in to an existing area of the existing airside facility, essentially consolidating them. Two dozen of the airport’s current 75 gates would be eliminated. Pittsburgh says only 39 of the gates are currently being used.
CURRENT AIRPORT WAS BUILT AROUND US AIRWAYS
The new plan would remake the airport that was revolutionary when it opened in 1992. Since then, however, Pittsburgh International has since become suboptimal for the city’s modern-day needs.
The current design was built almost exclusively to specifications called for by US Airways, which at the time used Pittsburgh as a major connecting hub that ranked among the nation’s busiest. The airport’s four passenger concourses were laid out like an X, giving connecting fliers a relatively short walk between gates — no matter which concourse they arrived to and departed from.
At the center of the “X” was the Airmall, a mall-like operation at the center of the airside terminal. It offered robust food and retail options and promised “street pricing.”
Though the concept has been widely emulated since, it was an untested concept for U.S. airports when it debuted in 1992. The new terminal proved popular among fliers, both local and connecting.
But US Airways — now part of American Airlines — ran into financial turbulence from the late
1990s into the 2000s, undergoing multiple bankruptcies amid a prolonged struggle to survive. In
2004, US Airways formally “dehubbed” Pittsburgh, the first move in its decadelong downsizing there that pared hundreds of flights from the airport’s schedule.
A steep decline in passenger numbers followed, leading to difficult times for the airport. Officials there even went so far as to wall off the ends of some of the concourses as passenger counts dwindled, allowing the airport to save money by shutting off utilities at the shuttered gate areas.
MORE PASSENGERS, NEW ROUTES TO EUROPE
But Pittsburgh’s airport has found new life this decade, its fortunes rising as low-cost carriers such as Southwest, JetBlue and Spirit helped fuel new growth there. Now, under the leadership of ambitious new CEO Christina Cassotis, some swagger appears to have returned to the airport.
In addition to its improving passenger numbers, Pittsburgh has now landed two new routes to Europe. In November, WOW Air announced it would fly from Pittsburgh to its hub in Iceland, from where fliers could connect to about two dozen other European destinations. That gave Pittsburgh its first year-round service to Europe since
2010. Three days later, Germany’s Condor Airlines announced seasonal service to Frankfurt. That gave Pittsburgh its first non-stop link to Germany since
2004, when US Airways discontinued its Pittsburgh-Frankfurt route as part of its hub dismantling there.
Now, the new terminal would continue Pittsburgh’s momen-
The update would eliminate the need for the “people mover” train Pittsburgh passengers currently must use to go between the existing “landside” and “airside” terminals.
tum as the airport shifts from a hub to one focused on local passengers.
“The plan unveiled Tuesday amounts to the ultimate makeover for a terminal opened as a US Airways hub in 1992 but one that now serves less than half the traffic and has more gates than it needs,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writes in its recap of the news.
FINALLY, ‘AN AIRPORT BUILT FOR THEM’
“The people of Pittsburgh finally get an airport built for them and not US Air,” David Minnotte, board chairman of the Allegheny County Airport Authority that operates Pittsburgh International, adds in the Post-Gazette.
The new landside terminal would be constructed between the C and D concourses that are part of Pittsburgh’s existing Xshaped airside terminal. The plan was approved Tuesday by the Allegheny County Airport Authority.
The agency says no local tax dollars would be used to fund the project, which could start as early as 2019 and wrap up by 2023. Officials also said the effort would not result in higher landing fees for airlines using the airport.