The Bag Stops Here

By Richard Woodbury/Denver

With its glass-walled atrium and skywalk, marble-walled terminal and soaring, Teflon-spired roof mimicking the peaks of the nearby Rockies, the brand-new Denver International Airport, the nation's largest, would be a prize for most cities. But there was no joy in the Mile-High City last week as Mayor Wellington Webb summoned reporters to his city-hall office to announce an indefinite delay in the airport's opening. To begin operations prematurely with a malfunctioning baggage system, the mayor warned, could be "disastrous."

The announcement was another blow for airport boosters smarting from three earlier postponements, snafus and design changes that have put the gargantuan project, bigger than Manhattan, seven months behind schedule and boosted the cost by hundreds of millions. It left them wondering if the $3.2 billion project -- the nation's first big new airport in 20 years -- was jinxed. Cynics who have long questioned the need for such an extravagant facility chuckled that D.I.A. should be renamed D.O.A. -- dead on arrival.

This time, as before, the problem lay beneath the airport's terrazzo floors, amid the underground warren of computers, conveyor belts, wires and thousands of motors that make up the airport's Disneyesque baggage system. As designed, 4,000 computer-guided fiber-glass carts, each carrying a single suitcase, will roll along 22 miles of serpentine steel tracks, delivering 60,000 bags an hour to and from dozens of distant gates and carrousels. The system employs electromagnetic motors attached to the tracks to power the carts, which are routed and monitored by banks of logic controllers, sensors and photocells.

But in its first extensive test two weeks ago, the system performed more like a Rube Goldberg nightmare. Carts crashed into one another, bending rails and disgorging clothes from suitcases. Others were knocked off the rails, jammed or mysteriously failed to appear when summoned. A Continental official, taking in the spectacle, pronounced it "sad." Glitches in the software seemed to be the culprit, but the larger challenge was the immensity of fully automating an entire airport's baggage system, something never attempted on such a scale. "There's no question that it works. We just need more testing time," insisted Gene Di Fonso, president of BAE Automated Systems, the builder.

Denver's city council deepened the task by refusing to award the job of operating the system to BAE, the only company that really knows anything about it. Leaders were worried that the Dallas outfit wouldn't hire enough minorities and women, though the firm insisted it would. In the wake of political infighting over who should get the lucrative contract, it went to an outsider, Aircraft Service International of Miami, which has had to race to fathom the system in a few months. Then too the eagerness of Denver's leaders to retain control and ensure minority participation in all phases of construction led them to put city officials in command, overseeing hundreds of contracts, rather than hand off the duties to a general contractor, who might have provided tighter management. Notes an insider: "It was raw greed. Everyone wanted a piece of the contract monies. The city lost control at the outset, and the project was destined to run amuck."

Once the planes begin flying, officials will have to contend with whether the grandiose project was ever needed and how important a complex seven times the size of existing Stapleton International Airport will be at a time of downsizing in the airline industry. Continental, D.I.A.'s second largest tenant behind United, has virtually abandoned its Denver hub, shrinking its presence nearly two-thirds and pushing the new airport, in the face of declining traffic projections, to cut its planned 120 gates to 84. Critics contend that despite congestion problems, Stapleton could simply have been expanded. D.I.A. "is a white elephant," charges Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant.

Denver's leaders predict that today's problems will be forgotten as D.I.A.'s ! efficiencies make it an economic anchor, boosting tourism and industry in the region. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena, who as Denver mayor in the mid-'80s got D.I.A. off the ground, calls it "an airport for the next century, a critical investment for the country." All that seems to stand in the way of that vision, the boosters say, is getting the annoying bugs out of the baggage software. But no one's betting that will happen fast. One reason: while technicians struggle to operate the suitcase carts, they haven't even begun to test other, larger vehicles that are expected to carry Colorado-bound travelers' most popular luggage: skis and golf clubs.