Travel: Breaking the Ground Barrier

Travelers at New York’s Kennedy International Airport were hopping mad last week — hopping out of cars, hopping over fences, even taking gates off hinges in their frenzy to escape the colossal traffic jams. One motorist needed 45 minutes to drive the two miles from the airport’s entrance to the Eastern Air Lines terminal. Another left Greenwich, Conn., early enough to reach Kennedy a full hour before his scheduled 8:30 p.m. Swissair departure, only to find himself at the end of an endless, motionless line of autos when he got to the field. Both missed their flights.

For the airlines, it was the busiest week of the year. By the tens of thousands, Americans were flying in from summer vacations, and foreign tourists were flying away after visits to the U.S. The resulting chaos at Kennedy gave ample warning of what lies ahead as the nation’s airports approach what authorities call “complete saturation” in the surge of travelers to take their trips by air. Statistics suggest the future nightmare. Some 114 million people rode the 2,100 U.S. airliners that plied American skies in 1966. By 1977, when the 490-seat jumbo jets will be in full service, the number of passengers is expected to rise to 350 million.

The Dead End. The problem of moving this vast torrent of people between cities is difficult enough. But the real headache is handling the flow from city to airport and in the airports themselves. As William Pereira, master planner for the Los Angeles Airport Commission, puts it: “The real bottleneck in the jet age is not in the air but on the ground. We must break the ground barrier.”

Every airport manager in the nation is aware of the looming crisis, and many have already begun to grope for solutions. Cleveland recently decided to extend its rapid transportation lines four miles to reach its Hopkins airport. Chicago has mulled over the possibility of damming Lake Michigan near the Loop for additional airfield space. And New York is debating a fourth airport, which may be 50 miles or more out.

The most dramatic plans, however, are those in progress at Los Angeles.

Its airport was brand-new six years ago —and outmoded before the cement on its new runways was dry. Its single-entrance internal road system has been dubbed the “world’s largest cul-de-sac,” and last fall it suffered a monumental traffic tie-up similar to Kennedy’s disaster last week. But things are about to change. The city has approved a $500 million program to expand the airport by 1971.

The Los Angeles Airport commissioners and their consultants, one of whom was Architect Pereira, were not really caught napping. Volume at the city’s old terminal in 1956 was about 3,000,000 passengers a year. Though the forecast for 1965 was 7,000,000, the Los Angeles planners decided to bet on eleven million. Even then, they were short of the mark, and the estimates for this year are close to 20 million, and for 1975 a whopping 55 million.

Up by Snorkel. Pereira’s plan looks toward the construction of five new airline terminals—all underground and equipped with their own subterranean garages—at the west end of the airport. Their probable occupants will be Pan American, TWA, United, American and Continental.

Among the more visionary aspects of the Pereira scheme will be lightning-like loading of such jumbo jets as the Boeing 747 by one of two methods:

huge, hydraulically operated subterranean lounges that will rise from the ground, unload their passengers via short, flexible bridges, then sink quickly to the terminal below; a system of four snorkels, equipped with escalators that will rise quickly from the underground terminal to the airplane’s doors, then vanish.

The seven existing terminals will be retained and expanded; a multilevel parking structure will be built above the present parking lot, giving the airport room for 33,500 cars. The internal road system may be double-decked, and six separate entrances and exits will replace the present single entry. Outside the airport, the state is being counted on for new access routes.

All told, says Pereira, the redevelopment should accommodate passenger expansion for the next eight years. It just might not. So he is thinking hard about other ways to beat the crush: helicopter-borne sky lounges, which would whisk passengers en masse from downtown sites to boarding ramps in less than 15 minutes; high-speed monorails; and a helicopter/small plane system that could relieve the area’s freeways of five to ten million airport-bound travelers a year. Eventually, Pereira believes, the whole airport business will have to be decentralized by using “satellite” fields on the far-flung corners of metropolitan areas as integral, megalopolitan parts of the national travel pattern. “If we take the airport to the people,” he says, “we can reduce the need for bringing people to the airport. That might not be bad at all.”