FAA Officials Drafting Plans For 12-Gate Dulles Concourse

Tuesday, December 13, 1983

Federal engineers are drafting an ambitious and potentially controversial plan to build a new passenger concourse with gates for 12 jets at Dulles International Airport, an addition they hope will correct what many airline officials see as a glaring defect in the 21-year-old airport's design.

Dulles has almost no facilities for direct boarding. This has made it poorly suited to the routing strategy on which many U.S. airlines are gambling their futures, the operation of large numbers of short-haul, interconnecting flights in and out of "hub" airports.

The concourse would allow passengers booked aboard short-distance flights to skip time-consuming rides on Dulles' mobile lounges, the huge vehicles that now take most passengers to and from their planes. Instead, they would ride to the new concourse on some form of "people mover," and then step straight into jets parked at conventional departure gates.

The idea seems certain to generate criticism that it will compromise the aesthetic integrity of Finnish architect Eero Saarinen's soaring glass, steel and concrete terminal building, which is a registered historic landmark and has been cited repeatedly as a masterpiece of modern design.

For now, the concourse is just a concept being developed by Federal Aviation Administration officials who run Dulles and National airports. But it represents an official admission that Dulles--the nation's first airport designed for the jet age--has problems reaching beyond its location far from downtown.

"The lounge system is there and will continue to serve a purpose," said James Wilding, director of Dulles and National. "But perhaps it shouldn't continue to serve as dominant a role as it has at Dulles."

Wilding said the airport needs to become "far more flexible and far more adapted to today's airline industry." Planners on his staff see the concourse as a key to efforts to limit traffic at National and foster orderly growth at Dulles, which has been underused since the day it opened in 1962.

The project still faces formidable bureaucratic obstacles, not only from the diverse collection of outside commissions that review any plan that could alter the architectural aesthetics of Dulles, but also from budget officials in FAA headquarters and Congress.

Still, officials at Dulles hope to have the concourse in place by the late 1980s or sooner. They say it is too early to devise meaningful cost estimates, but that tens of millions of dollars is closer to the mark than hundreds of millions.

As tentatively envisioned, the concourse would stand about 1,200 feet from Saarinen's terminal. The two would be linked by an underground passageway, possibly with moving sidewalks or automatic trains. As a backup, mobile lounges would operate as shuttles.

The concourse would start with 12 gates, with room to grow to 22. The terminal, meanwhile, would continue to handle all the airport's ticketing and baggage facilities. The airport's 33 mobile lounges would still take care of all long-distance flights.

The concourse would be held to two floors and painted the same dull gray used to camouflage service buildings at which jets now park. "We do not want anything out there that would compete architecturally with the terminal," said Frank Conlon, engineering chief for Dulles and National.

Dulles was laid out in the 1950s, before the first commercial jetliners had flown. At that time it was expected that jets would focus on long-distance trips, said Wilding, perhaps with passengers paying a special fare premium as they do today on the supersonic Concorde.

With mobile lounges, the terminal building could be designed without concern for walking distances, whether aircraft height and size would change or how they would look alongside it. People headed across continents or oceans would not mind a few minutes' wait in a padded mobile-lounge seat, it was reasoned. "They designed a beautiful terminal," said Thomas Morr, president of the promotional agency Washington Dulles Task Force, "and it works well in a lot of ways. But they didn't envision airline hubbing."

As a result of airlines' dissatisfaction with the lounges, much of a recent upswing in service at Dulles has centered on small and crowded gates below the control tower, which the original plan intended only for small, propeller-driven commuter planes. Here passengers walk across open tarmac to their planes and climb old-fashioned stairs.

USAir began four departures a day at Dulles this fall and had to fight for space at the tower gates. "Let's face it," said USAir spokesman Jack King. "One of our flights goes to Richmond and three go to Pittsburgh. That's anywhere from 35 to 40 minutes in the air. The mobile lounge trip, that's just a lot of time on the ground."

King continued: "We need a terminal plan that will provide for the best utilization of your equipment and that means shorter ground time." He said that "anything that addresses these needs is progress."

The concourse is part of a revised 20-year master plan now being prepared for Dulles. Its draft form also sees construction by early in the next century of two more runways, expansion of the main terminal and construction of parking lots for 10,000 more cars.

All of this would require the approval of FAA headquarters and funding from Congress. Wilding points out that fees collected at National and Dulles more than equal their operating and capital costs. Despite hard times, Congress has put up money for Dulles--it recently approved $25 million for the new road that connects the airport access highway with Rte. 66, another project meant to promote the airport.

A task that may prove more formidable than funding is pleasing the Fine Arts Commission, the National Capital Planning Commission and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which will study any plans from an aesthetic point of view.

Wilding said all three have only advisory functions. Despite its lack of formal power, the Fine Arts Commission won significant design changes when the the main terminal's lower level was expanded several years ago, commission secretary Charles Atherton said.

Dulles planners initially looked at expanding the tower gates as a means of solving the problem but tentatively rejected the idea. The main reason, Conlon said, was that there was not enough space. But planners were also aware that this would have more visual impact on Saarinen's terminal and be harder to sell to the commissions.

But Atherton said that any change would be studied hard. "Anything that is added around that building obviously is going to affect it," he said. "So we're just as concerned as to what they will be doing out at the middle of the field."

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