Austin Airport Keeps Growing

Photo by Jana Birchum

Christmas is a time for family cheer and travel misery. Yet, in a year when Austin Bergstrom International Airport looks set to host more people than it was designed to handle, airport staff hope the misery will be minimized.

Nationally, the airline industry and the airports that serve them have had a rough time. ABIA is not just an exception, but a total outlier. While most airports are losing direct flights and carriers, ABIA is gaining both, including its first direct flights to Europe. That growth is driven by passenger demand. Bergstrom was designed to handle a maximum of 11 million passengers a year; with airlines reporting 9.8 million passengers by the end of October, ABIA is expected to bust that cap in 2015.

Across the last half-decade, the basic travel patterns across the year have remained the same: February is the slowest month, July the busiest, and the holiday season somewhere in the middle. However, each year sees a roughly 10% increase in embarkations over the previous one. City of Austin Aviation Department Senior Public Information Specialist Jason Zielinski called this "a reflection of the strong Austin economy, and a sign of how many business and tourist travelers are flying."

In fact, the converted Air Force base has seen record growth in passenger and freight numbers since January 2010. October 2015 was the 37th consecutive month of year-on-year growth, and the 69th in the last 70. The only exception was September 2012. The reason? Zielinski said, "Austin City Limits moved from September to October, so that month was flat."

Big events are a big driver for ABIA. March sees a huge spike in numbers because of SXSW, and the biggest single traffic day is the Monday after the Formula One U.S. Grand Prix. In fact, the winter travel holidays, while busy, are not the busiest. The idea that the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is the heaviest travel day is a myth: At ABIA, it's actually only 41st on the list. Similarly, Christmas traffic sees growth across the entire week, rather than a Christmas Eve spike. Zielinski said, "People have more time off, they have a week or two around New Year's, so it's more spread out."

Yet even taking holiday and festival peaks and troughs out of the equation, ABIA is getting crowded. While the actual gates are working fine, regular Monday mornings are pre-checkpoint torture, with lines snaking around the concourse. Part of the problem is that the terminal was designed to handle security in a pre-9/11 world, and new TSA protocols mean longer checks and longer lines. So to handle those changes and the increased numbers, during the last couple of years Bergstrom has radically redesigned the space outside of the gates.

In 1993 – six years before the airport opened – the city adopted a master plan for expansion and renovation. A decade later, it was updated, with massive long-term plans for growth. However, rather than add capacity that won't be used for years, or overreact just for a few peak days, the airport has made incremental changes as the year-round demand grows. Zielinski said, "You don't build a new church just for Easter Sunday."

Over the last couple of years, several of those trigger points have been reached (although regular fliers may argue they were breached much earlier). Extra security checkpoints and passport controls have been added, and there are two new luggage carousels, primarily handling international passengers. Outside, there's a massive new parking structure for rental cars, freeing up the top deck of the old parking lot for public parking.

That's a lot of new capacity, and the holidays aren't using it all. So why does it still feel worse around Thanksgiving and Christmas? Ask any seasoned business road warrior, and they'll blame irregular fliers who don't know to take their shoes off before security, or are wrangling an entire family rather than just an overnight carry-on. From the airport's point of view, it's not the total numbers for the day, but how many people are there are at certain times, and airlines play a role in this. As more companies run more direct flights out of Austin, they are more likely to park the plane here overnight. That means last arrivals land later, first departures leave earlier, "and so during Christmas, those mornings are going to be a little busier," Zielinski said.

However, while passenger numbers are up, so far ABIA has not seen a dramatic increase in the number of planes coming in and out. Instead, airlines use bigger planes, and existing flights are fuller than ever, usually running between 90% and 100% of capacity, rather than the old figures of 80-90%. That explains where your elbow room went, but it also means Bergstrom is reaching another of those all-important trigger points. That's why, in 2014, Council approved the next stage of the master plan: adding new gates. The idea is to add seven or eight new gates (the final number depending on the size of planes the airlines want to land), which will increase the overall capacity from 11 million to 15 million people a year. Zielinski said: "That's supposed to get us through 2025."

See the Bergstrom Airport Master Plan at www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/images/Airport/Master_Plan_Chp1.pdf.