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Originally Posted by TakeFive
 
 It definitely was a hot topic for humor on late night tee vee shows.
Different circumstances though; Denver metro density is mostly along I-25 or generally a north-south direction. DIA is actually 'centrally' located and very accessible from the whole of the metro area. Sky Harbor is ideally situated for metro Phoenix (and doesn't have the operational and growth issues that Stapleton had). It would have been a total clustermess to move Sky Harbor way out towards the south (east or west). It's centrally located right where it is.
Maybe if they were to sell (enough) tickets they could add 15 more units.
Have good friend who lives in north Phoenix (near Tatum and Dynamite) and just returned from visiting friends in Arkansas who used Williams/Gateway AP. I guess she saved significant money. But since she left around 4:00 am the drive was easy as was parking etc.
I'm always curious why Denver/DIA has so many damn runways compared to Sky Harbor - seven with plans for more?  Runways, at least at his point in time are expensive to build. If they don't need four no reason to build it. |
Once upon a time, airport runways were to serve as backup runways in times of war - to land/stage strategic bombers, etc. (which is why places like Sky Harbor, Deer Valley Airport, Goodyear Airport, etc are all nuclear targets) I don't know if this was kept in mind when DIA was built (end of cold war era) - do they really have that many flights in/out of there to keep 7 runways busy? Or is it just because the weather/wind is so chaotic that they have a number of options to operate 3 or 4 of them in any direction at any given time?
Anyhow - a bit off topic for this thread...