U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg joined local leaders Thursday at the world’s busiest airport to mark a milestone in one of the country’s major airport infrastructure initiatives.
Buttigieg joined Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens at the construction site where work is underway to build pieces of an expansion of Hartsfield-Jackson’s Concourse D.
“For a long time we were lamenting the condition of America’s airports,” Buttigieg said. Now, he said “we have the best and most innovative style of construction to deliver world-class terminals to the busiest airport in the world.”
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
The officials gathered to commemorate the first move of a huge prefab section of the expansion to the concourse site earlier this week, marking a step forward in the project to alleviate congestion in a crowded part of the airport.
Concourse D is the narrowest concourse of the Atlanta airport, and it becomes over-crowded during busy periods, when passengers have to push their way through crowds to get to their flights.
Hartsfield-Jackson General Manager Balram Bheodari said he recognized that “the customer service level that we are providing customers (is) an F on Concourse D” and there was a “need to do something.”
Passenger counts are expected to continue to grow. But the world’s busiest airport can’t shut down for construction.
The approach Hartsfield-Jackson is taking to widen Concourse D from 60 feet to 99 feet is to prefab sections of the expansion, so construction can go on without shutting down the working concourse.
The project received $40 million in federal funding from the federal bipartisan infrastructure law. The full project, including the construction of extra gates on Concourse E to make up for gates lost due to the work, will cost a total of $1.4 billion and take until 2029 to complete.
Buttigieg said the $40 million “made it possible to accelerate and advance this project” and is part of a larger flow of over a billion dollars of federal funding for airport terminal projects across the country.
Buttigieg said the decades-old Concourse D was built “for a different time, the 1980s.” He added that “a lot of good things came out of the 1980s,” gesturing to himself. But, “It’s different in 2024 — the volume of passengers, the size of the jets serving this airport.”
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
The airport has been building the prefab sections of the concourse expansion at a construction site off Sullivan Road on the south side of the airfield, and contractors have spent months preparing to transport the prefab pieces.
The first building section was very slowly and carefully transported to the concourse site in a complex operation carried out in the wee hours of April 24.
Credit: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
With the movement of the first piece, “You’re one step closer to that modernized concourse that will accommodate the volume of passengers who travel through enough,” Buttigieg said. The wider concourse “is a big deal ... so you don’t have to zigzag around other passengers to get to your gate.”
The expanded concourse will also have more seating and larger restrooms, and will be more accessible to passengers with disabilities.
Each huge building section is transported atop a self-propelled modular transporter (SPMT) — a motorized platform on wheels. The SPMT 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 sections of the building expansion are about 40 feet tall, 30 feet wide and up to 192 feet long. The pieces will be transported to the concourse site over a period of about five weeks. Then, the sections will be attached to the working concourse like building blocks.
“These building blocks are the building blocks of a lot more than an airport,” Buttigieg said. “They’re the building blocks of the future of aviation, making air travel safer and easier and more comfortable for millions of people,” he said.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
To be sure, there have been some disruptions to travelers, even with the prefab construction being done off-site. To prepare the building to attach the expansion pieces, the airport closed eight gates on the north section of Concourse D for the first phase.
While the concourse will be wider and longer when the work is done, there will actually be fewer gates than when it started. Airlines are shifting to larger jets, and the expanded concourse will go from 40 gates down to 34 gates including more space for larger aircraft.
Dickens said the concourse widening means travelers will have “a more pleasant experience with us and it guarantees that Atlanta remains a city that’s built for the future.”
