What's Behind the Delays at Austin's Airport and What's Being Done to Help

By The Austin Chronicle / Original photo courtesy of city of Austin

On Thursday, June 23, travelers to and from our city were delayed at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS), as they often are, but for a new and exciting reason: biohazard in the control tower! When a Federal Aviation Administration employee tests positive for COVID-19 and is symptomatic, the agency likes to bring in the deep cleaning crew in a hurry to disinfect and sanitize the affected workplace. (Air traffic controllers can't really work from home.)

The FAA, which confirmed it had activated the protocol due to a COVID case, says it's not unusual to close towers, that other controllers in the system can pick up the slack, and that the cleaning only takes one or, at most, two hours – but until it happens, a new shift of controllers can't take over. A closure has happened before during the pandemic, back in May 2021, a month when 1.1 million passengers passed through AUS. In April 2022, the latest data available, 1.87 million passengers did the same, which set a new record, which will surely be broken this summer.

Samantha Haynes manages AUS's public information office, which is also its marketing & community engagement and emergency communications office. Haynes and her team, which is two people plus a consultant on contract, serve as on-the-ground spokespeople for not just the city of Austin Department of Aviation but, as best they can, all the stakeholders at AUS – airlines, the FAA, concessions, cargo, private (general) aviation, etc. "If you haven't traveled since 2019, it's a very different air travel environment," Haynes says, adding that AUS staffers have a term for the unpleasant surprise those folks experience. "We call it 'lobby shock.'"

They spend a lot of time on Twitter and other social media engaging with AUS customers, including when the latter are circling overhead waiting to land because the tower is being sterilized. Or trapped outside in an increasingly stuffy 737 parked on the apron while it awaits a clear gate. Or at the wrong end of an endless security checkpoint line that they breezed through last time they flew – for some people that was last week, for others it could have been 2018.

At 1:27pm on June 23, @AUStinAirport tweeted: "The FAA Air Traffic Control Tower is undergoing a required sanitization & deep clean. Travelers should be aware that AUS will be experiencing delays for both arrivals and departures. … Thank you for your patience." As was reported later by a tipster to KXAN, it took about five hours for the cleaning crew to arrive. It then took until nearly midnight for "regular staff levels and regular operations" at the tower to resume. "We understand how frustrating these unanticipated impacts to AUS air service can be," @AUStinAirport tweeted at 11:46pm. "We greatly appreciate your patience & understanding as our partners worked to fulfill their own health & safety protocols." To which one follower replied, "Lol no one understands. But we're forced to."

You can imagine the general tone of the interactions in between, as every flight in and out of Austin was delayed three hours on average, some up to nearly six. Here are just a few of the things you really don't want to hear from your customers:

• "I just heard [that] the cleaning hasn't even started yet! Seriously?! Who is running your airport?" (@tangledinplaid)

• "Cancelled flight this afternoon = cancelled trip, nice job AUS" (@xo151)

• "FAA (and y'all) couldn't plan this around existing flight schedules??? Been awake 24 hr after international flight and stranded overnight in Chicago because my flight to Austin was canceled for … cleaning for a virus that is found in every HEB in the state? Get it together." (@DolanRN)

• "Stop the insanity!!!! 3.5 hour flight delays ALL DAY! Why are we sanitizing all day long?? #joebidensamericasucks" (@moffitt_sarah)

• "You guys have turned the Austin airport from one of the best to the worst in the US…" (@texanatlarge)

• "In fairly record time, even." (@solanum72, in reply)

If you're a city resident and taxpayer, you own the Austin airport that has disappointed these people so thoroughly, even when you and the Department of Aviation have no control whatsoever over these outcomes. "I'm not sure if the FAA even could get to passengers" to inform them of things like an unplanned daylong tower shutdown, Haynes says. "We can, and we want to make sure what we tell customers is actionable. Check with your airlines."

She adds that none of those airlines have Public Information Officers (PIOs) in Austin, nor does FAA; at the Transportation Security Administration, Haynes' counterpart serves the entire Southwest region and dozens of airports. "So we're the boots on the ground. We share the goal of a positive customer experience, because we have the same customers."

The last of the tweets above sum up the brand-management challenge that faces Haynes and her team, as AUS quickly and brutally rebounds from the abyssal depths the travel industry faced at the nadir of the COVID-19 pandemic. Once upon a time, not that long ago, AUS was one of the nation's favorite airports. Now, it's in the news for its random but serious moments of dysfunction. And as it scrambles to fast-track expansion projects and quickly fix its most troublesome issues, it keeps running into turbulence.

2018 (shown in light blue) was the first year that AUS topped 1.5 million passengers in one month. Year-over-year figures for 2019 (purple) and the beginning of 2020 (green) showed airport traffic growing around 10% annually. Then COVID destroyed the air industry, and AUS would not see that many passengers again until July 2021 (red). After about six months of stability, traffic is zooming up again, breaking new records in March and April of 2022 (dark blue). (Courtesy of Austin Department of Aviation)

Rising to Great Heights

When the new airport opened in 1999 on the grounds of the former Bergstrom Air Force Base, it represented a big glow-up for Austin as the city climbed toward its turn-of-the-millennium peak like Lance Armstrong climbing the Pyrenees. It had local restaurants! Local music on the PA! Live performances overlooking the baggage claim! Cool and clever public art that people adored! It was calm and clean and spacious and people would go there just to hang out. (This reporter spent many an afternoon playing with his pre-K son and watching the airplanes.) It was a vibe one can find in today's Mueller neighborhood, but that was totally absent at the former Robert Mueller Municipal Airport.

Then came 9/11, and you couldn't go through security without a ticket, and most of these cool amenities are on the air side, and the landside wasn't designed to accommodate huge crowds. Even so, in 2002 ABIA (as we called it then) ranked No. 2 in the world in J.D. Power's much-cited annual airport customer satisfaction study. It's consistently gotten above-average scores in the years since, even as it's moved up from "medium" to "large." But in the 2021 J.D. Power rankings, AUS now ranks below Dallas Love Field, which has got to sting.

The enormous lines that spill out into the street in front of the terminal and make national news will no doubt put more downward pressure on AUS when the 2022 rankings come out this fall. As we've previously reported, the proximate cause of those lines is a dire staffing shortage at the TSA checkpoints. The airlines likewise have too few personnel to operate the gates they lease from AUS, which is why planes end up waiting an hour on the apron before a gate is clear for them. The airport is only responsible for making sure the Jetways work, but gets the blame regardless. Staffing shortages also explain why the concessions are closed when the early and late flights arrive and depart, another recurrent pain point for Haynes and her team: "We want more of our concessions to be open when there's clearly a demand."

Unpredictable perfect storms of Austin problems and aviation problems converge at AUS. "The airport is a microcosm of the region as a whole," Haynes says, noting the metro area's unemployment rate of roughly 2.5%. "We have gridlock like I-35 and have to expand quickly like Capital Metro" is doing via the Project Connect transit system overhaul. "And we're being impacted by … the national and international challenges facing aviation. It's really tough in the air industry right now, and air travel is really complicated; so many things can affect us that are out of our hands."

There's Always Been a Plan

Back on Twitter, every week or so in calm times, and every hour or so in chaotic times, you'll see sentiments like this one: "Austin needs to expand this airport yesterday. There's zero reason to always have traffic to drop off and pick up" (@Stormaggedon). It only took four years, until 2003, for the original master plan that guided ABIA construction to be outstripped by demand. About a decade later (post-Great Recession), AUS began expanding in earnest.

Unlike the airport it replaced, there are no real aeronautical constraints at Austin-Bergstrom; it can handle the largest planes and could support a nonstop flight to or from Tokyo or Buenos Aires, should the market ask for one. The 2019 update of the ABIA Master plan does not foresee needing a third runway at AUS until midcentury. The capacity constraints have all been on landside and at the gate – not just in the Barbara Jordan Terminal concourse and "arrival hall," but at baggage claim, in cargo handling, at the rental car lot, in the taxi queue, in the parking lots, and everywhere else.

By 2019, the Dept. of Aviation had invested at least $500 million, and its partners millions as well, in these landside uses – reconstructing and greatly expanding garage and rental-car parking, opening a second on-airport hotel, adding administrative office space and a maintenance facility, building a cellphone lot that wasn't needed back when AUS was mellow, even opening a Whataburger and gas station. There has also, of course, been massive investment in the roadways to AUS, in off-airport parking, in mitigating airport noise, and in other things that the city cares about.

In 2019, AUS had also opened the eastern expansion to the Barbara Jordan Terminal, with nine gates, and in doing so created the space that would later be in-filled with the new Checkpoint A, near the Southwest counter. Even earlier, in 2017, it had come up with a clever way to quickly add gate space for value-priced carriers such as Allegiant – converting one of the surviving Bergstrom Air Force Base buildings into the retro-cool South Terminal. All told, there are 37 gates at AUS – 34 at BJT and three at the South Terminal – four of which are international. By the time the airport reaches 18 million annual passengers, the master plan reads, "substantial capacity expansion will be required." That time is right now.

It's Yesterday Once More

The final draft of the ABIA Master Plan document is dated March 2020, the month that nearly put AUS out of business. In April, at the nadir of the first wave of COVID, the airport saw 47,781 passengers, less than 4% of its traffic a year earlier. At that point, it was still very much uncertain whether air travel could ever come back safely, or if the market for such travel would ever return. Ironically, passenger volume right now (18 million annually) is what the master plan forecast for 2022, but two years of implementation time has been lost in the interim. And if passenger volume returns to the 10% annual growth it saw in 2019, then we'll hit 22 million in two years, at which point the master plan forecast calls for 48 gates.

In response, AUS is front-loading a suite of the most critically needed expansion projects into what it calls the Airport Expansion and Development Program. The final environmental assessment for the AEDP has been released by the airport and the FAA, which has until Sept. 30 to give its green light. The AEDP has 32 project component, which cluster into three main categories: optimizing the Barbara Jordan Terminal; building a new 10-gate (to start) midfield concourse, connected via tunnel to the BJT; and a bunch of airfield reconfigurations to support future growth, including a new central utility plant.

Even as it awaits the official go-ahead from FAA, which it will almost certainly receive, AUS has expedited projects within the main terminal that don't require this same environmental clearance. These include constructing Checkpoint A, which opened last fall; reopening the "non-contact" gate (currently Gate 13, with stairs instead of a Jetway) that was used by now-obsolete small-craft commuter flights to accommodate "off-schedule" flights, e.g., those that have been diverted. The large atrium space where you can look down into baggage claim, which is no longer very cool or useful, is set to be filled in so that TSA can expand the adjoining checkpoint.

One of the 32 projects in the AEDP is a three-gate expansion at the terminal's west end (the higher-numbered gates), which is already in procurement; that would bring AUS back in line with the master plan's 2022 forecast. But the marquee item is surely the new midfield Concourse B, which will be built where there are now taxiways and connections to the apron, which will have to be moved to the south to make room, which will require the demolition of the South Terminal – over the vehement objections of LoneStar Airport Holdings, who partnered with the city to redevelop that facility and in March 2016 executed a 30-year lease and concession agreement to run it.

Deleting the South Terminal

"The idea behind the design of ABIA's South Terminal … is to restore some 1950s glamour to the increasingly tiresome task of air travel," Richard Whittaker wrote in these pages in 2017. "On the wall inside the terminal hangs a mural, a vintage image of hat-wearing men in suits and women in sundresses, walking down the steps from a vintage prop plane. But the backdrop isn't Bergstrom: It's Mueller, Austin's original airport." In the five years since, people who regularly fly value carriers Frontier and Allegiant have learned, sometimes the hard way, that their oasis of Mid-Mod charm is 15 minutes and 8.5 miles by road from the Barbara Jordan Terminal. (There are lots of signs and a shuttle service.)

Passengers make their way to a flight at the South Terminal shortly after it opened in 2017 (Photo by Jana Birchum)

The ABIA Master Plan is silent on the conflict presented by the South Terminal lease, or on how losing its three gates and the 18 daily departures authorized in the lease factors into its future forecasts. As for the AEDP, LoneStar Holdings' Jeff Pearse made 128 separate comments on the draft environmental assessment (out of 160 total comments received from all stakeholders and the public). A lot of these are extremely technical and some are petty, but one of the first says the assessment "should reference that there is an existing South Terminal Lease and Concession Agreement. … The rehabilitation and reconstruction of the South Terminal allowed for additional flights and carriers to move into the Barbara Jordan Terminal and provide ABIA customers with additional opportunities for competitive rates from ultra-low-cost air carriers." (This comment was accepted.)

Pearse also provided "three viable alternatives that should have been evaluated" to either relocate the South Terminal or relocate the needed taxiways so as to not require its demolition. To which the planners reply that the FAA and AUS, before even embarking on the environmental assessment, decided what the optimal alignment for these taxiways should be: "The 'three alternatives' provided by the commenter are not consistent with the optimal alignment [and] are in conflict with the long-term vision for development," they wrote, noting that future expansions would likely involve additional parallel concourses to the south. "None of the three alternatives [is] considered practical and feasible to implement."

At its June 16 meeting, City Council authorized the filing of eminent domain proceedings against LoneStar Holdings, an unusual and unproven legal strategy for breaking, rather than simply buying out, an inconvenient lease. "Closure of the South Terminal will kill ultra-low-cost carrier service from Austin," Pearse said in a statement following the vote. "Options for price sensitive travelers will disappear in our market. The airport's pursuit of eminent domain … will result in years of expensive, time-consuming litigation, delaying expansion plans even further and sending a signal to every business in Austin that making major investments alongside the city is a dangerous bet. This isn't eminent domain. It is the taking of a business."

According to the latest AUS statement on the matter: "The Department of Aviation will continue to fulfill its contractual obligations and exercise its rights under the South Terminal lease. The City will now move forward with acquiring the leasehold through condemnation. This action is necessary to increase capacity for more flights at AUS … We continue to work on a transition plan to relocate Allegiant and Frontier to the Barbara Jordan Terminal in the coming years, [which] will not decrease the service and benefits that passengers have come to expect from AUS. Opportunities for relocating South Terminal tenants and their employees to the Barbara Jordan Terminal are also being explored. The Department of Aviation looks forward to working with each tenant on a customized transition plan."

The final form envisioned for AUS in the latest (March 2020) version of the ABIA Master Plan. There's not a hard schedule for this buildout, but the components are grouped into phases (color-coded) based on when the airport's expected passenger traffic will make them necessary. The most urgent projects are those shown here in red – including the first 10 or 12 gates of the new midfield concourse, additions to the Barbara Jordan Terminal, and the controversial jet fuel depot on U.S. 183. (Map courtesy of AUS)

People Want to Know More

The bulk of the environmental assessment comments not related to the South Terminal have to do with environmental concerns, broadly defined. In addition to questions about the climate impact of an expansion of air travel, one of the most carbon-intensive things our green-thinking city actually encourages people to do, there are grumblings from neighbors and their advocates around the airport, for whom a bigger, busier AUS does not much enhance their quality of life.

None of these is specific enough to prompt a revision of the draft assessment, and many of them are in response to the crisis earlier this year surrounding the construction of a new jet fuel depot, slated for a spot on U.S. 183 South directly opposite a neighborhood of about 50 homes off McCall Lane. "I live near the airport and I don't want that new fuel expansion," wrote commenter "Bobs." "Put that shit in Westlake. Austin decade after decade puts the nasty shit on the other side of town. … None of the people who stand to profit from this expansion live in the area that will be affected when that thing leaks or blows up. Please stop."

To which the planners respond: "The commenter's opposition to the fuel storage facility is acknowledged. However … the fuel storage facility was the subject of a separate [environmental assessment] that was approved in 2020." The FAA noted in its "finding of no significant impact," or FONSI, that "on occasion there is less than two days of fuel reserve at the current facility, which is an operational risk." The site opposite McCall Lane was deemed the safest and least sensitive of all those examined by the FAA and AUS. "The Proposed Action does not meet the definition of a project requiring public notification," the FONSI reads. "No agency coordination or public involvement was under­taken." When neighbors, with support from Council Member Vanessa Fuentes, tried to undo that decision, they ended up having very few options other than filing a lawsuit, which they have done, challenging the FAA's authority to grant the FONSI without having talked to them first.

The fuel-depot fracas, which came early in AUS's spring of public discontent, did drive home the need for Haynes' team to get more involved, earlier, in making sure that the internal decisions and mysterious workings of AUS are known and understood by the airport's customers and citizen owners. The airport is currently selecting a marketing and community engagement consulting team to work specifically on communicating the progress being made on the AEDP and how AUS is trying to keep people satisfied. "What we heard from the community is that people have an appetite for more information," Haynes says, "which we want to provide."