In ancient times, men tried to foresee
the future by looking at the movement of birds. Decode the way they
rose and fell on the wind, the Greeks thought, and one could get a
glimpse into the mind of the Gods.  

Out at the Little Rock National Airport
these days, they’re still doing something akin to that. Instead of
trying anything as simple as seeing into the fates of men, however, the
Little Rock Airport Commission and a group of paid consultants are
after a peek into much cloudier waters: the future of the notoriously
unpredictable airline industry.  Their goal: update the Little Rock
National Airport’s aging terminal with an eye toward where Little
Rock’s travel demands will be five, 10, or even 20 years hence.

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Sound daunting? Add to that
skyrocketing fuel costs that might never come down; airlines merging,
going belly up, or jumping ship on smaller airports like Little Rock
(Frontier, one of eight carriers that had served Little Rock, pulled
out of the market as of June 1, and the potential for international
flights from Latin American carriers Aeromexico and Mexicana seems to
have evaporated as well); security concerns we could have only dreamed
of 10 years ago, and a potential price tag that could head well into
the $100 million range before the project is finished, and it’s easy to
start thinking those old fellas in togas, squinting at their finches
and wrens, had it good.

Whatever the case, say airport
officials, Little Rock can’t afford to wait for calmer seas. When the
dust clears, they insist, the city will have a shining new doorstep (or
at least one so vastly refurbished and expanded that you’ll never
recognize it) to greet the travelers of the new millennium.

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If an airport is like a pump — pulling in arrivals, filtering them
through security and baggage claim, gushing out departures — the
terminal and gate complex at Little Rock National Airport long ago
became too small for its fish bowl.  Completed in 1972, the current
terminal features only 12 gates; six of them staggered along a narrow
concourse and the rest huddled around a circular rotunda at the end.
Waiting areas at the gates are notoriously cramped. The truck-sized
baggage X-ray machines squat in the lobby, next to the ticketing
counters — which almost everyone involved agrees might be the most
unattractive place possible to situate the noisy, grunt-work
contraptions that scan luggage. Security — 1972 was long before anybody
had ever heard of shoe bombs, remember — is confined to the throat of
the corridor that leads to the gates, creating a textbook bottleneck.
On some days, the line for security screening snakes through the
terminal, past airport shops and restaurants, and down the escalator to
the lobby.

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One doesn‘t have to have a degree in
engineering to know that almost all the major problems at the Little
Rock National Airport terminal can be traced back to volume. Today,
arrivals and departures at the airport are easily double what the
terminal was designed to handle when new. According to figures
collected by Jacobs Consultancy — the Boston-based firm hired to help
make suggestions for what an expanded and refurbished terminal should
look like — in 2008, there were an average of just over 8,000 arrivals
and departures daily at the airport. By 2028, Jacobs projects, that
figure will have risen to almost 13,000 passengers a day.

Jimmy Moses is the chair of the Little
Rock Airport Commission’s three-person Terminal Task Force. He admits
that trying to plan for a new terminal when the airline industry is
virtually seasick from recent financial ups and downs is “a very
complex puzzle.”

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“It makes it very difficult,” Moses
said. “We’re talking about long-term capital investment of millions and
millions of dollars, and we’re trying to work with airlines who are one
week announcing non-stop service to one city and the next week
terminating service to two others. It makes it very confusing and
difficult to plan.”

The Airport Commission started looking
at expanding the terminal two and a half years ago, and Moses said that
there has been some erroneous reporting about the terminal project in
the past.

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“We’re not talking about do we build a
new terminal or not build a new terminal,” Moses said. “We’re talking
about, how do we create a better facility and do it in phases?”  The
current plan is a phased approach that will take the old structure down
to the bones, piece by piece, and build back something totally new.

“Getting it done could take three,
five, seven or even 10 years, depending,” he said. “But we can’t just
sit still when we have to enhance our baggage claim or our screening
area, or provide more ticket counters. We’re not in the position where
we can just sit around and wait on those things.”

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At the moment, Moses said, things are
in the very early planning stages. Back in May, Jacobs Consultancy came
to town and presented four possible layouts for a new terminal. The
Airport Commission has yet to take up discussions on those
possibilities as of this writing. While those four options have some
major differences — whether or not to include a station that would
serve as the terminus for a proposed 3.4-mile track extension to bring
River Rail streetcars to the airport, for instance — there are enough
similarities that one can see what amounts to a rough outline of the
future.

In all the potential refits, every
major area of the terminal will get a vast space upgrade, from a
multi-lane security checkpoint to almost doubling the width of the
concourse. Baggage X-ray and inspection machines will be moved to a
more out-of-the way area, opening up the lobby and ticket counters. In
three of the proposed plans, the rotunda at the end of the concourse is
replaced with a more modern “hammerhead” configuration that can
accommodate more planes. All the proposals would up the number of gates
to 16 or 17.  

Ronald Mathieu is the interim director
of the Little Rock National Airport. He said Jacobs Consultancy has
been vital in helping the commission sort through some of the more
difficult issues involved in terminal renovation.

“What they’ve come back and said, which
shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, is that given the state of
volatility of the airline industry … the far more reasoned approach is
to say, well, how do we adjust the facilities at the airport for the
future and not spend a lump sum at one time?”  The answer, Mathieu
said, is the phased approach, in which areas of the terminal are
closed, refurbished and expanded, and then brought back online. Even
with the current volatility in the airline business, Mathieu said, one
thing is for sure: Planes will fly in and out of Little Rock National
Airport in the future, and the terminal has to be ready for that.

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“The reality that we’re facing today is
the incredibly high cost of fuel,” he said. “I don’t believe for a
moment that the federal government will allow all the airlines to go
out of business and put everybody in cars. I think the airlines are
going to exercise some self-help with the consolidation and mergers,
but at the end of the day, if it really tends to get worse … I think
you’re going to see the government step in and take some steps to
protect their air transportation system.”    

 

Whichever of Jacobs’ recommendations the commission decides to take
to heart, Jimmy Moses said renovation and expansion will start where
the need is greatest: enlarging the passenger screening area and
getting the X-ray and baggage inspection equipment out of the ticketing
lobby. Even before the recommendations from Jacobs came in, the
commission had secured $16 million to accomplish those goals.

“Those are projects that we already
have dollars allocated [for] through our TSA funds and had planned to
spend money on this year and next,” Moses said. “I think that we’ll
probably be looking at a refinement of our early plans and possibly
even expanding what we do initially over our original thoughts of a
year and a half ago.”

Tom Schueck is a member of the Terminal
Task Force. While he said the terminal makes a good impression for the
city now – bright, clean and well appointed — it’s just too small. When
it comes to expanding, he said, he’s all about space.

“The more space you can give me, the
better,” Schueck said. “Up there where security is, you go up that
escalator and it’s all jammed up. We want to get a lot more space in
that area, and it’s going to be kind of combined with the inline
baggage [systems] in the remodel. We’re trying to make up our minds on
what to do there.”

Schueck’s desire for space extends to
the size of the planes he’d like to see flying out of Little Rock in
the future. He said that the Airport Commission is always negotiating
with the airlines to fly bigger airplanes into Little Rock, as opposed
to the smaller turboprops and regional jets. Currently, regional jets
and turboprops make up around 70 percent of the traffic in and out of
the airport.

“We could probably sell more tickets if
we had bigger airplanes,” Schueck said. “But getting the airlines to
listen — you have to sell Little Rock to the airlines. You’d think
they’d want to keep us happy, but it’s the other way around.”

 

So, what’s it all going to cost, both in money and inconvenience for
travelers? The easiest answer for now is, nobody really knows. All
agree, however, that there will be some degree of inconvenience for
travelers during the building phase. While that could have been avoided
by building a new terminal elsewhere and keeping the old one online
until a changeover,  Airport Commissioner Bob East said financial
factors made that impossible.
“With a new terminal,” East said, “you build it, start using it, and
then tear down the other one. But we’re talking $250, $300 million
dollars.” A lump sum like that makes a phased approach, with its much
smaller checks to write over 10 years, preferable.

While Moses said the price tag for the
terminal expansion could “run well upward of  $100 million,” he
stressed that the commission likely won’t know about a final price tag
until all proposals are in and the commission talks to the groups that
will be involved in the decision making. Moses said he wishes the
airport could simply approach local taxpayers to bankroll the bulk of
the cost, but added, “We’re not contemplating any sort of tax or
overall request from the public to fund anything here. I’d be all for
it, but I think one thing that Central Arkansas and Arkansas in general
is a little short sighted on is public transit and how we fund that for
the good of the state.”

Instead, Moses said, funding will most
likely come from more “traditional sources,” such as the FAA, possibly
upping the $4.50 per passenger TSA charge the airport collects, or
“some novel ways to renegotiate airline agreements.”

Airport Commissioner Virgil Miller, a
banker at Metropolitan Bank, agrees that going to the public with a
hand out would be the wrong way to accomplish the airport’s goals. “The
first thought is always, ‘Go to the people,’ ” Miller said. “But I
don’t think you can afford to have that kind of thinking. We need to be
creative and out of the box. I think we’ll have to take a look at
options we haven’t discussed before.”

Like his fellow commissioners, Miller
said that it’s probably inevitable that airport travelers will be
subject to some amount of inconvenience during the reconstruction
process. The payoff will be quicker trips through the airport in the
future. “You can’t have an omelet without cracking some eggs,” Miller
said. “I think it goes without saying that when we change up, there’s
going to be some inconvenience. But I think most people are going to
understand and be patient. They understand that you have to put up with
certain things to get your end goal.”          

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