Airport for 2001

When Fort Worth decided in 1927 that it needed a commercial airport, the town fathers choked back civic rivalry with nearby Dallas long enough to propose a joint effort. Dallas huffily declined, buying the Army's Love Field instead. But in the mid-'60s, the cities overcame their animosity and agreed to build the world's largest airport, 17 miles from each downtown area. Local boosters are spending over half a million dollars to inaugurate the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, climaxing this week with a four-day Texas bash of balls, banquets and barbecues. Among the scheduled guests are President Nixon, officials from 48 countries, and a British-French Concorde SST.

DFW, as the airport is called, will be completed in three stages: the first ending Oct. 28 of this year, the second in 1985 and the third in 2001. Larger than Manhattan Island, the prairie complex was designed to meet virtually every known airport problem. Its spacious runway system, planned to be tripled in capacity, will easily handle peak loads well into the 21st century.

Airport planning, under the engineering firm of Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton (TAMS), was so far ahead of its time that many features resulted in an updating of FAA regulations. New patterns of lighting for both centers and edges of runways, as well as brighter, low-glare runway signs for pilots, will now become mandatory. TAMS also persuaded the FAA that conventional twelve-inch runways were not thick enough. DFW uses 17 inches of concrete, enough to receive million-pound aircraft (a fully loaded, stretched 747 weighs 880,000 lbs.). Furthermore, the runways are designed for thickening to 24 inches to accommodate heavier aircraft now on the drawing boards -and possibly even rocket-powered airliners of the future.

Reaching passenger gates should be easy via a ten-lane, 55-m.p.h. spinal highway between the two rows of superterminals (the four now operating will become 13 by 2001). DFW Executive Director Thomas Sullivan, who oversaw the building of La Guardia, Newark and J.F.K. airports, chose a simple semicircular terminal design that allows passengers to drive directly to one of 66 gates, which are all within 120 ft. of the airplanes. Older terminal designs, which often park airplanes at the ends of long "fingers," may entail hikes of as much as a quarter-mile from counter to plane.

Airtrans. To move people round the airport there is Airtrans, a 13-mile system of automatic electric-powered tracked vehicles that ride on a cushion of air. The system can carry 9,000 passengers, 6,000 pieces of baggage and 70,000 lbs. of mail every hour. Even though transit passengers may have to cover more than three miles from one plane to another, they can reach any point in the airport in about ten minutes.

The airport manager's biggest environmental headache, noise pollution, is reduced by the very size of the place. Beyond each end of the runways extends a 4 1/2-mile buffer zone, without any buildings, followed by another mile where private housing is banned.

The worst problem seems to be getting there in the first place. The Dallas and Fort Worth city councils, claiming a monopoly on ground transportation to the airport, are being sued by Continental Bus Systems Inc., which wants a piece of the action. While the matter remains snagged in the courts, the only way to go is by that old environmental nemesis, the automobile. Even that will not be easy, because traffic jams seem certain to develop on behind-schedule highway approaches.

Texans don't seem to mind, however. Residents are convinced that DFW will transform the area into the economic anchor of Middle America. They shrug off charges that extra acreage was bought so they could call their airport the world's biggest and ignore the fact that Montreal is building a bigger one. Theirs is the biggest now. Says former Dallas Mayor Erik Jonsson, who helped bring the two cities together in the first place: "A wholly different world will be opening to us."

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