In the dark hours of a night in late April, a giant prefab section of an airport concourse is set to be very slowly transported across the airfield of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
It’s part of a complex construction project designed to expand the airport’s Concourse D without shutting it down, allowing flight operations to continue.
Concourse D is the narrowest concourse of the world’s busiest airport, with crowded gate areas and congested corridors that passengers have to jostle through to get to their flights.
As passenger counts continue to grow, airport officials knew they had to expand. But they didn’t want to shut down the concourse to widen it.
Hartsfield-Jackson officials and contractors came up with a plan to prefab sections of the concourse expansion at a site near the airfield, and then transport them overnight to Concourse D.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Each piece will take about an hour to travel the 1-mile distance to the concourse from the construction site off Sullivan Road on the south side of the airfield.
The huge building section will sit atop a self-propelled modular transporter (SPMT) — a motorized platform on wheels. The vehicle moves at about 1 mph and is typically used to transport large things like oil refinery equipment, bridge sections, roofs and other sections of buildings.
The route the SPMT will take has been carefully studied for slopes or changes in grade, since it will be traversed by a low-riding vehicle carrying a section of a building about 40 feet tall, 30 feet wide and up to 192 feet long.
The transport of the first concourse piece is tentatively scheduled for the wee hours of April 24. By 1 a.m., flight operations slow to a trickle and the taxiways and runways on the south side of the airfield can be shut down to make way for the operation.
“We’ve got a window to move it from 1 a.m. to 4” in the morning, said Pete Pemantell, vice president of operations with Holder and project director for Holder-Moody-Bryson-Sovereign, the joint venture handling the Concourse D widening project. About 200 workers are involved in the project.
The contractors have spent months preparing, and have a detailed, minute-by-minute plan for preparation and the actual movement of the first 160-foot-long piece. The building section will have to go through security screening before it is transported onto the airfield.
The project to widen the concourse from 60 feet to 99 feet has already caused some disruption to travelers.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
To prepare to attach the expansion pieces, the airport has closed eight gates on the north section of Concourse D for the first phase. Boarding bridges have been removed from the building and work has begun to remove the exterior surface of the building.
After each piece in the first phase is transported to the concourse site over a period of about five weeks, the sections will be attached to the working concourse like building blocks. Then the interior will be completed, to open the expansion. Six larger gates will reopen as construction shifts to another phase and another section of the concourse.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
It will cost $1.3 billion and take until 2029 to complete all phases of the concourse expansion. Another $100 million is being spent on adding three gates to Concourse E to make up for D gates lost due to the work. The project received $40 million in federal funding from the federal bipartisan infrastructure law.
When it’s completed, Concourse D will actually end up with fewer gates. While there were previously 40 gates there, the new widened version will have just 34 gates. That’s because the airport wants to be able to handle more of the larger jets that airlines are shifting to, which also need more space to park.
President Joe Biden got a brief rundown of the project when Mayor Andre Dickens visited the White House earlier this year.
“Right now, we are expanding Concourse D,” Dickens told Biden in a video shared by Biden’s office.
Dickens took out a toy-sized model of the transport vehicle and said, ”This thing here enables us to build it a mile away and then transport it in millimeter-like precision. ... So a big section of our airport is built offsite and we roll it in here overnight and that way we can keep people working, keep the airport flowing and still be able to expand this concourse.”
“Well you know, it is the busiest airport in the world,” Biden said in the video. “The idea that you continue to expand, continue to modernize, continue to speed up transportation, is really important.”
Seeing the mayor and president talk about the project was “cool” and “really exciting,” Pemantell said. The diecast model Dickens showed to Biden came from the joint venture construction team.
There is some risk in such a massive undertaking. Inclement weather such as lightning or high wind could delay the plan.
Airport officials are planning to quietly carry out the first movement of a building section without the world watching, said Frank Rucker, senior deputy general manager of infrastructure at Hartsfield-Jackson.
“We want to make sure we get this right,” he said.
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