Chicago is widely known as the Windy City, but it’s also snowy and icy. That creates challenging conditions at Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD), said to be home of the busiest sustained winter airport operations in the world. This past season, for instance, it processed more than 1,200 flights per day.
The new terminal, set to open in January 2021, is 91,000 square feet, with four gates that can accommodate four narrow-body aircraft simultaneously. The entry hall features an expansive 45-foot glass wall that bathes check-in, baggage claim and a meet-and-greet area in natural sunlight. The TSA checkpoint exceeds minimum design standards to prepare BRO for evolving security requirements.
Beatlemania, bell bottoms and lava lamps. These were all the rage in the ’60s, when most of the bulk fuel farm at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) was built. It contains 62 tanks varying from 250,000 to 500,000 gallons each because it was designed for the way airlines worked at the time, with different grades of jet fuel and fuels with different tax status stored separately. But today, with comingled fuel and improved metering technology, the fuel farm is just as outdated as bell bottoms.
For decades, Milwaukee General Mitchell International Airport (MKE) received its jet fuel from an off-airport Shell storage facility supplied by a pipeline running from Chicago-area refineries up the western shore of Lake Michigan through Milwaukee to Green Bay, WI. But in 2016, the pipeline operator decided to decommission the segment of pipeline north of Milwaukee, and Shell consequently announced plans to sell the facility that supplied all of MKE’s jet fuel.
New York is the city that never sleeps. That’s the level of energy brought by the private consortium that recently redeveloped the Terminal B Arrivals and Departures Hall at LaGuardia Airport (LGA), one of the largest airport construction projects in the world.
In mid-March, just as most of us started using the phrase ‘social distancing’ and began wondering how the impending shelter-in-place orders would affect our states, Oakland International Airport (OAK) in California was dealing with one of its first ‘unprecedented’ events related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before design of the $590 million Terminal 3 Modernization Project at Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX) in Phoenix began in 2013, about 30 stakeholders held a workshop to establish goals for the project. Consensus within the group was to ‘create a world-class facility that was value-oriented, efficient and created a sense of place.’
Building the world’s largest airport-based solar farm doesn’t come without challenges. But the team developing the new 320-acre, 42-megawatt (MWac) solar farm at Tallahassee International Airport (TLH) prevailed’and also shattered previous records for renewable energy production for airport sited solar farms. When the new facility became operational in January 2020, it joined TLH’s other solar farm that came online in 2018. Together, the two solar farms span 400 acres and produce 62 MWac per year, vaulting the Florida airport well ahead of other industry standouts.
In September 2018, Hurricane Florence dumped 35 inches of rain on the Carolinas, with winds gusting up to 130 mph. The Category 4 storm created widespread flooding that closed major freeways and other roads for days after landfall, completely cutting off access for 120,000 people in Wilmington, NC, and many more in surrounding communities.
