As I was sitting in a plane for twenty minutes, taxiing from one end of this monstrosity to the other, I thought of this community! Inside the airport is even worse. It’s just this GIANT, sprawling mall+airport thing, with flat parking deserts in between terminals that are so far apart you have to take a monorail to them. Absolutely wild.
While I agree with all of that, if you’re local, you can get dropped off basically at your gate.
This was modeled after the Airport of Tomorrow in Kansas City, which was heavily influenced by TWA who demanded “drive to your gate”, which was in itself heavily influenced by what TWA did at JFK with Eero Saarinen.
That was basically doomed from the start as planes got bigger. And the nail in the coffin was security added later on and basically trapping you in a tiny, crummy gate area at MCI (can you imagine no security at all??) and finally destroyed by the post 2001 security enhancements that made it even worse.
They’ve recently opened a new MCI terminal that replaces the airport of tomorrow and looks like an airport of today.
You do realize that DFW has nearly 2000 flights every day, and 200,000 customers, every single day, right?
You need 6 terminals at that point. The rest of that is just infrastructure, taxiways, and runways. And the runways are spaced at the minimum distance apart for FAA rules.
It’s a masterpiece of design, just from how big and complex it is.
Six terminals, definitely. That far apart? IDK about that. SeaTac serves 125kish passengers per day and while you do need to board a little train thing between a couple of the stations, the rest of the terminals are walkable. (And the little train thing between terminals at SeaTac is a hop skip and a jump vs the DFW monorail.) DFW feels like they had the space so they just built it as big as they wanted. It reminds me of when I create giant mansions for my Sims only to realize it takes then an in-game hour to go check their mail. At some point it’s just no longer efficient.
To be clear, we flew through here and I am very grateful this airport exists! They got us home safe.
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While I agree with all of that, if you’re local, you can get dropped off basically at your gate.
This was modeled after the Airport of Tomorrow in Kansas City, which was heavily influenced by TWA who demanded “drive to your gate”, which was in itself heavily influenced by what TWA did at JFK with Eero Saarinen.
That was basically doomed from the start as planes got bigger. And the nail in the coffin was security added later on and basically trapping you in a tiny, crummy gate area at MCI (can you imagine no security at all??) and finally destroyed by the post 2001 security enhancements that made it even worse.
They’ve recently opened a new MCI terminal that replaces the airport of tomorrow and looks like an airport of today.
That is some impressive airport knowledge
No question, I’m a plane nerd.
Thanks for imparting your knowledge.
That’s really interesting! Thanks for the context.
You do realize that DFW has nearly 2000 flights every day, and 200,000 customers, every single day, right?
You need 6 terminals at that point. The rest of that is just infrastructure, taxiways, and runways. And the runways are spaced at the minimum distance apart for FAA rules.
It’s a masterpiece of design, just from how big and complex it is.
Six terminals, definitely. That far apart? IDK about that. SeaTac serves 125kish passengers per day and while you do need to board a little train thing between a couple of the stations, the rest of the terminals are walkable. (And the little train thing between terminals at SeaTac is a hop skip and a jump vs the DFW monorail.) DFW feels like they had the space so they just built it as big as they wanted. It reminds me of when I create giant mansions for my Sims only to realize it takes then an in-game hour to go check their mail. At some point it’s just no longer efficient.
To be clear, we flew through here and I am very grateful this airport exists! They got us home safe.