FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1955
1955 - 0534.PDF
534 FLIGHT Idlewild's New Terminal Area PLANS for an international air terminal costing more than£20m were completed recently by the Port of New YorkAuthority. The terminal will be located at the existing airport of Idlewild, which handles the bulk of New York's inter-national air traffic and much of the long-haul domestic services. Idlewild's official title is, in fact, New York International Airport,though the earlier name is still widely used. As at London Airport, passengers travelling to and from NewYork International have been "processed" in temporary buildings. To the extent that permanent buildings are situated at the centreof their respective runway patterns, the two airports are taking a similar approach to the common problem of handling increasedtraffic. But whereas, initially at least, all London traffic will be served by two or three terminals maintained by the airportauthorities, the P.N.Y.A. plan for New York International envis- ages the construction of eight terminal buildings, seven of whichwould be operated by individual airlines. The largest of the new structures, to be operated by the PortAuthority itself, will be the International Arrival Building and its adjoining Airline Wing Buildings. Services of non-American air-lines will be centred on this point. United States carriers, including American, Eastern, PanAmand Trans-World, will operate the seven individual terminals, whose position relative to the main building is illustrated below.Virtually the only part of the new terminal area actually in existence is the 150ft, eleven-storey control tower, though pre-liminary work on other sections has begun. Statements welcoming the P.N.Y.A. plan have been issued bysome of the airlines directly concerned. One, Eastern Air Lines, recalled the construction at Miami, at company expense, of aseparate terminal capable of handling 19 Super Constellations, adding that but for these expanded facilities the airline would havebeen unable to develop traffic in the area to its present volume. With its associated roads, taxiways and aprons, the new Idlewildterminal area will cover 655 acres—105 acres more than the total area of La Guardia Airport and more than four times as large asthe central area at London Airport (158 acres). It will have load- ing positions for 140 aircraft, and die floor area of-the passengerbuildings will exceed lm sq ft. New York International is the best-known, though not thebusiest, of the four airports serving the New Jersey/New York region. The terminal development plan expresses the P.N.Y.A.policy of allocating an increased share of traffic to Idlewild. Last year the four airports—Idlewild, La Guardia, Newark and Teter-boro—handled over 600,000 aircraft movements and 9,300,000 passengers, of whom the vast majority travelled on scheduled ser-vices. Busiest of the four was La Guardia, which had a take-off or landing every three minutes (round-the-clock average) andhandled nearly 5m passengers last year. This one airport, inci- dentally, deals with more passengers and mail than all UnitedKingdom airports combined. Passengers arriving at or departing from Idlewild in 1954totalled some 2.9m, of whom one-third travelled on overseas flights. Newark handled nearly 1.5m passengers. The fourth air-port, Teterboro, does not handle passengers in the commercial sense, though in terms of movements (by business, private andtraining aircraft) it was even busier than La Guardia in 1954. Some 1954 traffic statistics for leading European airports willlend perspective to the New York figures quoted above. Last year, British airports handled some 4,390,000 passengers, of whom2.4m used airports in the London area: of these, London Airport handled 1.7m passengers, and Northolt (now closed), not quitehalf-a-million. The two major airports of Paris handled 1.75m passengers, of whom two-thirds travelled via Orly and theremainder through Le Bourget. Schiphol, international airport of the Netherlands, handled 616,000 passengers. The P.N.Y.A. proposes, ultimately, to concentrate at Idlewildall overseas traffic to and from the New York region, together with half of long-haul U.S. domestic traffic, a third of domesticcargo traffic and a quarter of domestic short-haul traffic. La Guardia will take about half of short-haul domestic and 10 percent of domestic cargo flights. Remaining scheduled domestic traffic will go to Newark, and Teterboro will continue in itspresent role. Passenger traffic at Idlewild is thus expected to increase from3m to 4m annually within the near future, and by 1965 the total is expected to pass the 8m mark. Between 1942 and 1948, when the airport was opened to com-mercial traffic, the City of New York spent $60m (£21m) on the construction of Idlewild. The airport was taken over on a50-year lease by the Port of New York Authority in 1948 (the other three metropolitan airports were taken over on the samebasis at approximately the same time). At December 31st, 1954, the Port Authority had spent or committed a further $66.5m(£24m) on the one site at Idlewild. Approximate cost of the new terminal facilities described here will be $60m, of which some$30m will be accounted for by the unit terminal buildings for individual airlines. These figures, incidentally, do not embraceall items of expenditure on New York International Airport; many other features have been added at private expense. The proposed central terminal area at New York International Airport is shown here in model form. In addition to the main terminal for overseas airlines (right), seven "unit terminals" will be operated by American companies. "Finger-type" walkways, each with eight or more gates, will extend radially on to the apron, enabling passengers to make their own way to and from any of 140 aircraft parking-positions.
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
