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- If the airport is large, the terminal area may include several centralized terminals. This occurs at Paris (Orly), London (Heathrow), Chicago (O'Hare), and San Francisco airports, for example.
onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/sr/sr159/159-022.pdfDESIGNING THE AIRPORT TERMINAL - Transportation Research Board
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What is a centralized terminal?
An airport terminal is a building at an airport where passengers transfer between ground transportation and the facilities that allow them to board and disembark from an aircraft. The buildings that provide access to the airplanes (via gates) are typically called concourses.
- Overview
- Open apron and linear designs
- Pier and satellite designs
- Transporter designs
- Remote pier designs
As passenger throughput at airports increases, the passenger terminal becomes a more important element of the airport, attaining a dominant status in the largest facilities. The passenger terminal may amount to less than 10 percent of the total investment in a small airport, but at large airports terminals often account for more than 70 percent of infrastructural investment. The design that is ultimately adopted depends principally on the passenger volumes to be served and the type of passenger involved.
Passengers are frequently classified as business or leisure, scheduled or charter, originating or destined, and transfer or transit. Business travelers tend to pay significantly higher fares, and airlines usually wish to provide a high quality of service in order to attract such traffic. The passenger terminal at Heathrow Airport near London, for example, was designed to a very high standard of space and decor to attract just this type of passenger. Scheduled and charter passengers, meanwhile, tend to have very different needs in the terminal, especially at check-in and in the provision of ground transportation. Palma Airport, on the Spanish island of Majorca, has a landside that is designed to accommodate large numbers of charter tourists arriving and departing the airport by bus.
Some airports have a very high percentage of passengers who are either transiting the airport (i.e., continuing on the same flight) or transferring to another flight. At Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport in Georgia and at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, for example, two-thirds of all passengers transfer to other flights and do not visit the cities where the airports are sited. These passengers have special needs but usually only on the airside of the terminal. There is no need to provide parking or ground transportation to the city for such passengers; they will, however, need transit lounges and other areas such as transit check-in desks.
Airports that receive a large number of transferring and transiting passengers are referred to as hubbing airports. At a hub, aircraft arrive in waves, and passengers transfer between aircraft during the periods when these waves are on the ground. By using a “hub-and-spoke” network, airlines are able to increase the load factors on aircraft and to provide more frequent departures for passengers—at the cost, however, of inconvenient interchange at the hub.
The oldest and simplest layout for passenger terminals is the open apron design, in which aircraft park on the apron immediately adjacent to the terminal and passengers walk across the apron to board the aircraft by mobile steps. Frequently, the aircraft maneuver in and out of the parking positions under their own power. As airports grow, however, ...
Where one building must serve a larger number of aircraft gates, the pier concept, originally developed in the 1950s, has been found very useful. Frankfurt International Airport in Germany and Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam still use such terminals. In the late 1970s, pier designs at Chicago’s O’Hare and Atlanta’s Hartsfield successfully handled i...
In the early 1960s the transporter concept originated as a method of reducing aircraft maneuvering on the apron and of eliminating the need for passengers to climb up and down stairways in order to enter or exit the aircraft. In a concept derived from much older designs (such as that at Linate in Milan, where ordinary apron buses are used), passeng...
The remote pier was introduced at Atlanta’s Hartsfield in the early 1980s. In this concept, passengers are brought out to a remote pier by an automatic people mover and there embark or disembark in the conventional manner. The system has proved very efficient for handling transfer passengers, but the long distances involved in the terminal layout n...
Jun 28, 2019 · Many airports now include unique architecture or artwork in their terminals. At the Chicago O'Hare International Airport, for example, there are art displays that passengers can admire as...
Jan 12, 2023 · Some airports have successfully managed to keep one terminal. This is generally much better for passengers and connecting flights, although it is hard to achieve in older airports with plenty of existing infrastructure. One older airport that has managed this is Amsterdam Schiphol.
If the airport is large, the terminal area may include several centralized terminals. This occurs at Paris (Orly), London (Heathrow), Chicago (O'Hare), and San Francisco airports, for example. Centralized terminals have many advantages.
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Toronto Pearson International Airport has two active public terminals, Terminal 1 and Terminal 3.
Nov 17, 2023 · Instead of relying on a single central hub, decentralized airports are designed with multiple terminals spread across different locations. These terminals are connected by a network of runways and taxiways, allowing for decentralized operations.
