AIRPORT CITIES: Gateways to the Jet Age

THE first siren whoosh of the commercial jetliner not only changed man’s notion of time and travel by shrinking the earth some 40%, but set off an earth-bound revolution that is transforming the whole façade and function of the jet age’s gateway: the airport. Nations and cities are taking a searching second look at the airports that served the piston-plane age —and finding them wanting. The result is an immense worldwide building boom to adapt them to the new and challenging problems—for pilots, passengers and cities —of the 600 m.p.h. jet planes. In the U.S. new or better airports are blossoming in Seattle, Miami, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles—and dozens of other airports are also undergoing major face-liftings. New runways are being hacked out of the wilderness in Asia and South America, and the travel-worn airports of Paris, Amsterdam and Mexico City, familiar to thousands of U.S. tourists, will soon sport a trim, unfamiliar look.

Prototype: Idlewild. The most glittering airport showcase—and one of the first to be rebuilt—is New York International Airport at Idlewild, the gateway to the U.S. (an estimated 8,550,000 air travelers this year). Because Idlewild is one of the world’s busiest airports (an average of 640 landings and takeoffs a day) and a technological primer of jet age forethought, it has become the prototype and laboratory for many of the world’s changing airports. This week ten officials of Aeroflot, the Soviet civil airline, will poke through every nook and cranny of Idlewild on a restricted tour of U.S. airports, searching for ideas to take back home. Cologne is building an instrument-landing runway with narrow-gauge lighting patterned after Idlewild’s. Frankfurt has jet-terminal improvements scheduled, but is waiting to see how Idlewild’s new facilities work.

Built in 1942 on land reclaimed from Jamaica Bay and what was once a golf course, Idlewild has become a vast, gleaming concrete-and-glass tiara (see color} covering 4,900 acres and representing an investment of $330 million. Much more than merely a big new airport, it typifies a whole new jet age concept: a self-contained airport city, so complete that it has two dramatic societies and an animal-port where anything from parakeets (50¢ a day) to lions ($5 a day) can be boarded.

Underground Airport. For all its glitter, Idlewild will have plenty of competition before the airport boom abates. Many of the new airports boast functional rather than beautiful buildings, must first use their money for such expensive necessities as lengthening runways—at $1,000 a ft.—to meet the 10,500-ft. jet requirements. But some airports with money to spare are experimenting with concepts as dramatic in jet age design as Idlewild’s.

Among them:

¶ Dulles International Airport, due to open near Washington, D.C. in 1961, is radically different in concept. Unlike most airports, it will have no passageways reaching out onto the apron to detract from its lofty, templelike terminal designed by Architect Eero Saarinen. Instead of jets coming up to terminal fingers, passengers will simply walk into giant “mobile lounges” that will move them out to the jets.

¶ Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, due to be finished in 1962, will be one of the world’s largest, with its three terminals forming three sides of a pentagon open in the front for parking.

¶ Brasília’s new airport, still on the drawing boards, will have the world’s only integrated underground terminal. Built like an aircraft carrier with service and passenger facilities underground, it will lift travelers by elevator direct to jets on the runway.

¶ Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airfield, nearly finished, is a $50 million showcase roughly the size of Florence and built in the shape of a triangle. Set on the Tyrrhenian coast (near the ruins of Ostia Antica) to make the most of prevailing sea breezes, it will have near-perfect visibility all year round.

Telescoping Corridors. Plain or fancy, the new airports are designed to cope with the growing problems of the jet age. The major problems: the jets carry more passengers at a time (up to 170 in a Boeing 707 v. about half that number in the biggest piston airliner), require quicker handling of more baggage. They have proved so popular that they have boosted U.S. air travel by better than 20% this year. Moreover, since one jet is seldom much faster than another, it is an airline’s service and reputation for luxury that pulls customers. The result: airlines themselves are sinking millions of dollars into lavish terminal facilities to lure customers.

Using new “jetway” covered corridors that telescope out to meet the planes, United Air Lines at San Francisco has a graceful, star-shaped terminal that can nestle five giant DC-8 jets at one time. To ease shoe leather, Dallas’ Love Field uses moving sidewalks to carry passengers to planes. Many new terminals—e.g., at Dulles, Idlewild, Seattle, Rome, O’Hare—are split-level designs to speed passenger traffic: air travelers deplane on the lower level, enplane on the second story, keep out of one another’s way.

Officials at Dallas’ Love Field studied crowd habits in Grand Central Station to learn the best arrangement for facilities: ticket counter close to the entrance so that passengers can drop their heavy bags and buy tickets, then insurance and cigarette counters, drinking fountains and—just before reaching the plane—rest rooms. With many another new airport, Chicago’s O’Hare will eliminate the garage atmosphere that now exists in many airport baggage-claim areas, may utilize a “perpetual motion conveyor belt” to automatically sort and store passengers’ luggage for each flight.

Radar Brain. One big reason for the growth of airport cities around terminals is a new jet age psychology. The layover passenger who has flown 2,000 miles in four hours sees no reason to spend another two hours commuting into the center of town, wants his overnight hotel and restaurants at hand. For passengers who are ending their flights, many new airports, including O’Hare, Dulles and Rome, are planning brand-new freeways to speed access to the city. Brussels has built, and Rome is building, railroad lines directly to the airport.

The new airports are also wrestling with the immense technological problems of the jet age. The hungry jets have made obsolete the ubiquitous airport fuel truck; Idlewild, Seattle, London, O’Hare and Brasilia are all installing underground fueling systems. Hong Kong Airport has solved its space problem by building a runway 8,350 feet into Hong Kong bay. Miami has a new $350,000 radar approach system. Near San Francisco, the Federal Aviation Agency is building an ultramodern, $5,000,000 radar air-traffic control center, whose Remington Rand electronic brain will track all aircraft in a three-state zone. Hardest-to-lick problem thus far is jet noise, but airport officials hope that the new turbofan jet engines will eventually alleviate even that drawback of the jets. Dulles Airport is planting 80,000 trees around its rim to help absorb jet noise.

While cities are hustling to catch up with the jet age, the wisest airport builders are looking ahead—to the 1970s and 500,000-lb. supersonic airliners. Seattle is building a runway extension long enough—and strong enough—for Mach 3 aircraft. Brussels, by the end of 1961, will be one of the world’s best-equipped airports, capable of handling 3,000,000 passengers a year v. the present 1,000,000. Explaining the philosophy behind the avant-garde Dulles airport, FAA Boss Elwood (“Pete”) Quesada says: “We designed this airport for the requirements not only of this decade but for the next decade as well. Not looking far enough ahead is one of the errors we’ve been making through the history of commercial aviation. We have forecast the requirements and are not indulging in building for today. We are building for ten years, twenty years, fifty years from now.”