Charlotte Douglas International Airport will expand next week, boosting its gate total by 9%, and hub carrier American Airlines is a beneficiary. But it is not an immediate beneficiary.
On Thursday, the airport staged a grand opening ceremony for a Concourse A expansion that will add nine gates, bringing the total to 105 gates, of which American will have 82 to operate the world’s third busiest single airline hub with 674 daily departures.
The $200 million expansion is an early step in a $2.5 billion airport expansion program that by 2025 is expected to add a fourth parallel runway, the biggest single cost item, as well as a new main terminal, expanded concourses and about two dozen additional gates, many of which will go to American.
But despite frequent recent pronouncements, on a series of investor calls, that it is benefiting from expansion at the Dallas and Charlotte airports, American will not get any new Charlotte gates until the end of 2019.
Today’s airline industry is intensely hub-focused, with about 90% of major airline flights operating at hubs, which operate profitably because hub carriers connect passengers between vast number of cities – American serves 160 destinations from Charlotte – while squeezing out competitors who can offer point-to-point service but must fill their aircraft with locally originating passengers.
“We’ve worked hand in hand with American on what they would like us to do,” said Jack Christine, airport chief operating officer. “American knows this was the first thing we had to do to get additional space.
“Everything is incremental,” Christine said. “The challenge is a very constrained facility.” Each day, about 25,000 people originate travel at Charlotte while another 100,000 make connections. Additionally, environmental impact statements are required for a new runway and other growth.
“We’re excited,” said Dec Lee, an American vice president and Charlotte hub manager. “The airport is expanding. What they’re doing here is great.” By the end of 2019, he said, American will get four new gates on existing Concourse A; sometime after that, it expects to get three new regional gates on Concourse E. American can operate about eight flights per gate per day.
Existing Concourse A has 13 gates, used by Delta, Southwest, United, Spirit, Frontier and Via. Every carrier but Delta will move to the A expansion, where Southwest will operate the first flight on July 16th. On existing A, Delta will use a half-dozen gates while the rest are renovated. Then it will move to the renovated gates while the remaining gates are also renovated. Delta is the number two carrier at Charlotte with about 5% of passengers.
At the end of 2019, with existing A fully renovated, Delta will have seven A gates, American will get four and the airport will retain two – which could be used by any carrier including American.
Next steps will include two more A concourses next to the new one, as well as a widening of the narrow B and C concourses where the majority of mainline American flights operate. The expansion in a half dozen years will also include the extension of international processing to C, so that American could add more international flights.
New Concourse A embodies modern airport beauty. It is spacious and light, with 733 electrochromic window panes that automatically tint in response to sunlight to control climate and light in the building.
A digital artwork by California artist Refik Anadol is the focal point of the concourse. It includes three high definition LED media walls, measuring over 2,000 square feet, that display constantly changing abstract visuals related to flight data. Passengers engaged in airport sitting should have time to figure out what exactly it is doing.
Seated passengers can also charge their phones: each of the 957 chairs in the gate seating area will have two USB ports and a power plug.
New A offers a stark contrast to B and C, which are often congested today. B and C opened in the early 1980s and were expanded in the late 1980s.
They were used primarily by American predecessor US Air. At the time, USAir’s biggest aircraft were Boeing 737-200s seating 120 passengers and 737-300s seating 144 passengers: most planes were smaller. Today, American sometimes uses the same gates to operate Airbus A330s seating 291 passengers.
On B and C, the number of square feet per gate, know as “hold room size,” is between 1,800 and 2,100, Christine said; in expanded A, the average number of square feet per gate is 2,700 feet.
