Portland International Airport (PDX) News

[maccoinnich]

Originally Posted by maccoinnich

I listened to the first hour or so of the PDX 2045 PAC meeting last night, until the start of a group exercise that I was less interested in. I'll post a link to the slides when I see them up on the website, but my big takeaways were:

• The Port is looking at shortening or closing the crosswind runway. Doing so would allow them to construct a more efficient taxiway layout, extend Concourse D (should that be recommended as part of the master plan), and save on maintenance costs.
• The planned increases by Alaska should take PDX passenger numbers back to 2019 levels sooner than the Port had previously been predicting, although I didn't quite catch if they meant 2025 will reach 2019 numbers (I suspect not though).
• PDX currently has 59 gates, of which 6 are international capable. These are a mix of common use gates and gates leased to individual carriers. If all gates were common use and optimized perfectly, by 2045 the airport would need 64 gates, of which 9 would need to be international capable. Leased gates are less efficient, so if all gates were leased to individual carriers the airport would need 75 total gates (again, with 9 international capable gates). Most likely, they'll be planning for somewhere in between.
• However, the amount of holdroom space at the gates is currently sub-optimum based on number of passengers on each flight.
• International capable gates D10-D15 are the least used gates at the airport. While they are used for domestic flights, the design of the sterile corridor requires that when one of the international capable gates is being used for an international arrival, it's not necessarily possible to board a flight at the other gates.
• With the new central terminal project soon to be complete, PDX is unlikely to need any more capacity at the TSA checkpoints any time soon.
• The concessions capacity is optimum for current passenger volumes, but would become less so over the planning period assuming growth in passenger volumes.
• The international arrivals experience has apparently come up at every meeting the Port has had so far. It seems they are very well aware of the complaints.
• FIS facility in particular is undersized for today's passenger volumes, and struggles to cope when there are two simultaneous arrivals. Right now international arrivals are reasonably spaced out, but delays happen, and as the airport adds service spacing by time gets harder.

Here's the presentation and summary notes.