Airport Design in U.S. Took a Big Hit on Sept. 11

On Sept. 11, federal officials did something they’d never done before. They took away the nation’s airports.

They’ve since given them back, but under new rules that will cost billions of dollars, boost air fares and change the way airports are built. Security has trumped convenience and commerce, the two principles that have long dominated design of the nation’s air travel gateways.

Architects with the luxury of building airport terminals from scratch now must consider borrowing security measures from military bases and foreign embassies when designing buildings they once rendered as airy cathedrals and public malls. They talk of corridors with hidden security doors and concealed bomb sensors, as well as retinal scanning devices to identify passengers and employees.

At most airports, however, designers are struggling to wedge new security requirements into the walls of yesterday’s terminals. There are doubts about meeting a 60-day deadline to begin installing bomb-sensing devices that screen checked baggage. In many terminals, there is no place to put the giant machines.

Los Angeles is one of a dozen or so cities forced to rethink long-planned renovations that had been predicated on moving passengers through terminals quickly and comfortably.

Mayor James K. Hahn this fall halted consideration of a $12-billion expansion of Los Angeles International Airport, ordering architects to remake LAX into the nation’s safest airport. Like many airport renovations, what started out as a project to increase capacity is becoming a tribute to homeland defense.

“I really believe that what’s going to emerge from all this rethought is a different prototype for an airport terminal,” Los Angeles World Airports chief architect Kim Day said. “There are too many changes out there to take the existing model and use it.

“The terminal of the future may be more like an old railroad station, with one great room with concessions all around it,” Day said. “As we move toward common-use gates, you would sit in the middle and they would announce, ‘Flight 267 leaving from Portal 7,’ and you would walk across the room to your gate.”

Designers insist that they can provide an environment safe from car bombers and hijackers without building windowless bunkers. But they face conflicting demands: terminals that are cheap to build and operate, yet big enough to be well-stocked with security equipment; terminals that allow the easy flow of passengers while screening for terrorists and weapons.

“I think what we learned [from Sept. 11] is we’re going to have to reconsider the economics of design,” said Adib Kanafani, chairman of the civil engineering department at UC Berkeley. “The terminal will be more expensive, so the debt burden will be higher, the lease payments will be higher, the operating costs for airlines will be higher, and air fares will go up.”

Federal Rules in Transition

From Seattle to New York, terminal projects have been put on hold while designers grapple with new federal rules, which are being issued almost weekly.

“The problem is we’re trying to build while all this is going on, so you pour a bucket of cement one day and dig it out the next,” said David Lind, president of Corgan Associates, a Texas-based firm building a terminal at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and renovating others in Miami and Houston.

Dozens of terminals were built and renovated during the 1990s, and many more are in the pipeline. Few, however, gave security a top priority.

Ron Polillo, the Federal Aviation Administration’s head of security research and development, has done some informal vetting of designs passed to him by architects.

One airport, which he declined to name, wanted to put its rental car return beneath the terminal, to make it easier for clients to catch a flight. “You can pack it with explosives and goodbye, terminal,” Polillo said. The plan was changed.

Plans for the Seattle-Tacoma airport called for a train stop next to the terminal so passengers could walk to check-in. “You could have five guys walk off with explosives and blow up the terminal,” Polillo said. The plan was scrapped.

Such convenience-first designs are not unusual in an industry based on getting passengers through a terminal quickly and comfortably--with just enough time to sell them coffee, pizza and souvenirs.

“Now we realize that’s created a huge security risk,” said Anthony Vacchione, a partner with Skidmore Owens, an architecture firm that recently designed Terminal 4 at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and the Continental terminal at nearby Newark.

In anticipation of stricter requirements, Vacchione said, both facilities have more space allotted for baggage and passenger screening. Security does not have to be obvious, he said: “Design should transcend that. It should be an environment where you should feel confident.”

Clients were more receptive to security issues after the Gulf War, Vacchione said, when terror alerts bottled up airport operations. But interest soon faded, he said.

The FAA until recently has been of little help, say airport planners and security experts.

As late as 1994, FAA guidelines didn’t mention security among the design priorities, which it defined as: “passenger convenience, operating efficiency, facility investment and aesthetics.”

Three months before the Sept. 11 attacks--and 11 years after Congress gave the FAA responsibility for terminal safety--the agency issued its long-anticipated guidelines on security issues in terminal design. But design professionals and even FAA insiders acknowledge that the 200-page volume is too general.

“The airports have taken the approach that FAA guidelines have never been very specific, so let’s go ahead and do a threat assessment,” said Ginger Evans, manager of aviation services for Carter & Burgess Inc., a consulting firm overseeing American Airlines’ 50-gate terminal project at JFK. Another terminal for United Airlines has been put on hold.

“You don’t start with, ‘How do I change the building?’ ” Evans said. “You start with the threat. Then you deal with what kind of technology do I need to deal with that threat? Then you design around that.”

Two years ago, when Ahmed Ressam was caught carrying explosives across the U.S.-Canada border with the aim of detonating a suitcase bomb in an LAX terminal during millennium celebrations, the airport woke up to one of its oldest vulnerabilities.

LAX and most big-city airports had done little to harden terminals against such attacks. For the most part, airport authorities have left the job to bomb-sniffing dogs and security guards.

“You want [terminals] to be open and airy and comfortable and make people want to fly--and all that makes sense--but no one has been able to come up with a solution in terms of blast-proofing,” said Ron Steinert, vice president in charge of aviation for Gensler Architects, a San Francisco-based firm that is designing security measures at several major airports.

The FAA is focusing on bombs left in garages and has restricted parking within 300 feet of a terminal. That rule, issued the week of Sept. 11, forced LAX and dozens of other airports to shut down parking lots.

LAX has since shown the FAA that its parking structures, built to withstand earthquakes, could also survive a blast from a 1,100-pound bomb, about the size that could fit in a sedan. The FAA granted LAX a waiver of the 300-foot prohibition, but since has asked airports to keep an eye out for larger bombs, the kinds that could fit in sport utility vehicles.

Though other airports are working on plans to beef up their parking structures, few have begun work to bombproof their terminals.

At LAX, for example, American Airlines has not significantly altered its artsy $245-million renovation of Terminal 4, which includes 1,000 square feet of laminated, earthquake-resistant glass panels. The design, according to the artist, is aimed at showing man’s desire to “transcend biological limits and soar through the heavens.”

Indeed, major architecture firms are virtually unanimous in their insistence that glass and security coexist in the airport of the future.

“No one wants to see the glass in terminals go away,” said Ginger Evans of Carter & Burgess. “We’re not going to be Chicken Little. We’re eagles, not Chicken Little. We’re not going to build bunkers.”

Hahn’s LAX plan, for example, calls for building a secure luggage inspection facility several blocks away from airport terminals. That way, people and their luggage are separated far from the gates.

“Then we can have glass and it can be open and we don’t have to put bomb walls everywhere because we’re going to prevent a bomb from getting in there,” said Day, the LAX designer.

Hahn’s plan also would solve the problem of how to fit the truck-sized baggage inspection machines into already squeezed terminals. It better: LAX is so crammed that no one is sure where to put the 107 machines needed to scan checked luggage at the world’s third-busiest airport.

Missed Chance to Prove Expensive

Designers at Seattle-Tacoma Airport apparently missed their chance to make room five years ago, when they were drawing up plans for the terminal project now under construction. It will cost “in the millions” to add the massive scanning devices, said Gina Marie Lindsey, director of aviation for the Port of Seattle, which runs the airport.

(Airlines have been scanning checked luggage on international flights since the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.)

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport made room for the new screening machines during its current renovation, but wasn’t going to buy them right away. Now it will, adding $150 million to the project’s cost, said designer David Lind of Corgan Associates, the firm designing Terminal D.

Then there are carry-on baggage and passenger screening. Most passenger checkpoints were added in improvised fashion to terminals that predate FAA requirements.

When they added them, airport officials followed the FAA’s recommendation that they use the least number of machines and operators to cover the maximum number of gates.

That decision is coming back to haunt airports, where checkpoints have become choke points.

“We used to see processing rates of 7 to 10 seconds per person through a device,” Lind said. “Recent studies show it’s more than 24 to 35 seconds per person. That’s if everything goes well. Then you have the take-off-your-belt and take-off-your-shoes scenario.”

Even Denver, which has 6.5 million square feet of terminal space, is pinched at passenger screening points.

“It worked well when the facility was built,” said Eric Miller, managing partner of Transsolutions. “It just was never anticipated the airport would operate this way.”

The security checkpoint crisis has also hurt revenues at airports such as LAX, which finds its profit-making concessions locked behind security, unable to sell to anyone accompanying passengers.

Concessions Are Hurting

Just after Sept. 11, concession business plummeted as much as 40%, said Rick Janisse, deputy executive director for properties and concessions for Los Angeles World Airports, which runs LAX.

If Janisse could do it over, he’d put a big concession area between the ticket counters and the entryway to the gates. “You give me 400 yards there and you can build a great concessions area,” he said.

LAX doesn’t have even 40 yards to give Janisse. Besides, a central concession area presents its own problems.

“If you put concessions before security, then you decrease the availability of concessions for people with tickets, and that will encourage them to go through security at the last minute,” said Geoffrey Gosling, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies. “Ultimately, I think these issues involve trade-offs.”

One trade-off, however, can’t be made, Lind said.

“The status quo ain’t going to fly. No one is going to tolerate a Terminal 1 where the line goes to Terminal 2.”

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FAA Security Guidelines

Three months before the terrorist attacks, the Federal Aviation Administration issued long-awaited guidelines for incorporating security into airport design. But design experts and FAA insiders acknowledge that the report is too general and has no regulatory teeth. Some examples of recommendations in the 200-page tome:

* Limit the number of access points to public lobbies.

* Visually differentiate public areas and secure or restricted areas.

* Select furnishings and accessories that avoid the concealment of explosives.

* Seek advice from structural and explosives experts on minimizing the effects of a blast.

* Emergency exits leading into secured areas should be minimized.

* Design to accommodate moving concessions (or screening points) during heightened security.

* Consider supervised storage in lieu of lockers.

* Observation decks are strongly discouraged; where they exist, they should be closed to public access.

Source: “Recommended Security Guidelines for Airport Planning, Design and Construction,” Federal Aviation Administration.