Symmetre

I've only been through the new terminal once, arriving into Canada from the US then continuing on home. It was late night arrival and I was one of the first off the plane with carry-on only, so I didn't experience any of the baggage issues or lineups at customs.

What couldn't be overlooked, however, was the distance to get to the gate for my continuing flight home to YYZ. Good grief. Next time I may flag down the Folkswagen.

Fiordland

in the common hold area that are counters for each of the airlines. In other airports you call them transfer desks. Not certain about in Calgary. The airline are suppose to man those and that is where passengers are expected to go for all of the regular item agents due at the gate. However the airlines don't man those desk. Perhaps the airline staff have not been trained in call to the gate yet.

FlyerJ

In my four trips out of the E gates, I've never seen a single person behind those counters. Never. A big counter. Nice signage for each airline. But, two months in to the new terminal, it seems they've never been used.

All of the airline staff are at the gates. Period. Need help? You have to leave the waiting area and go to your gate ... in a CTG terminal. Even though YYC says you're not supposed to until it's boarding time.

One big problem: staffing those counters in the central hall would require incremental headcount, meaning more cost for each airline. Exactly what WestJet is crying foul over. Totally understandable that none of the airlines are playing ball.

And it really makes me wonder to what extent AC, WS, and all of the other airlines were truly consulted in the design of the building and in the roll-out of this Call To Gate system. It sure seems like they either had little say or were ignored -- and the YYC authority just stayed on their course anyway.

aerobod

The towing distances between gates in the new terminal to old terminal (E to A) combined with the lack of swing gates (which would reduce towing) was simulated at WestJet in 2009. The estimate then was that we would need to add an extra 737 to the fleet to cope with the increased turn times to deal with the time wasted in towing. No significant terminal design changes were made to alleviate this problem.

sokolov

I'm lost for words.

FlyerJ

But the problem is that, as airlines and routes grow at an airport, the airport needs to grow. Which makes distances further apart ... both for positioning aircraft and for passengers walking. It's kinda the harsh reality of operating out of a hub -- any hub. The facility can't get bigger without distances increasing.

The only way around this problem would have been to make two separate, "full service" terminals - one for WS, one for AC, the other airlines scattered between the two - each with their own CBSA and CBP facilities. Essentially like YYZ, where gate ops, aircraft positioning, and staffing are probably easier for both airlines since everything is in one building for each airline.

But YYC just isn't big enough to make that work. We'd need a critical mass in both of those terminals, which just isn't there and won't be for a long, long time. Until then, it's one combined facility for international for all airlines here.

Unfortunately this distance challenge is a bit of a "suck it up, buttercup" for the airlines at YYC. Want gate capacity and terminal capacity? Want to not have your customers weather the hell that was concourse B transborder?? You can't have it all sadly.

Frequentlander

All these are good points but no swing gates is an obvious oversight and the hokey golf-cart thing could have been done better with a fixed rail system.

I personally am definitely NOT a fan of the call to gate system. Too many times at LHR T5 have I been called to gate only 30 minutes before departure and have to deal with the train system to get to another concourse then walk some considerable distance to get to the gate. I can live without the stress that causes.

dodgy

The solution should have been to have US and International through what is now B and C. WJ stays in A and AC moves to the east side which would be D (where new terminal is). Saves on the all the concerns noted above.

An Airport Authority not giving a care about what works for their tenants and customers - shocking - just keep paying the AIF.

Antonio8069

How did the YYC Airport Authority complete this w/o consulting its largest tenant?

This is more evidence that CA airport authorities are out of control & on the wrong track.

FYI, many of these criticisms also apply to the YUL transborder terminal expansion. The difference? AC was obsequious.

WR Cage

I was about to respond to ARF04 but then saw Fiordland made all my points.

Well said, great minds think alike. ^^

(1) While YYCAA cannot take the blame for CATSA issues, the airport can and should do a lot more to advocate for YYC pax.
Some things YYCAA could do:
- Publicly denounce CATSA and their CATSA Plus machine much like what Saretsky and Westjet are doing to YYCAA. Specifically, CATSA is assuming the new machines have twice the efficiency of standard machines. Well the YYCAA should be holding CATSA and GardaWorld to account. If the machines aren’t up to snuff in real world activity then complain that longer lines are impacting throughput and pax experience.
- YYCAA should publicly complain that YYC is the only major airport without a functioning Nexus lane at its facility. CATSA Plus be damned but YVR, YYZ. YOW, YUL, etc all have Nexus lanes where card carrying members get the full benefits. Where as YYC pax only get front of the line access.
- YYCAA should work with CATSA to determine if there is a way to remove from GardaWorld duties the line sorting and BP scanning duties. The BP scanner could be moved to the Airport Ambassadors. This could easily free up enough resources to have an additional lane open at checkpoint E at all times.

I have reorder some of the sentences in the above quote for readability and brevity.

(3) I have been aware of WestJet’s desire for concourse C since the airport broke ground. IIRC WS initial response to YYCAA was give us what is now concourse C. But the airport could not dislodge AC. Hence the golf cart train was born as a mitigation for WS concerns.

(4) The issue specific to WS is that their pax are much more susceptible to having issues with long walks. WS prime pax is the visiting friends and relatives traveller who is traversing Canada but does not have frequent international travel, save for a few trips to USA. The WS pax avoids YYZ T1 at all costs and would never go to LHR, FRA, or any major American airport. WS has a higher percentage of elderly and pax travelling with young children. In contrast AC has all the world travellers and frequent travellers.

For comparison purposes, YYC has about 65 gates or regional ground load positions directly attached to the terminal (I am excluding remote stands). The level of activity is comparable to:
- UA’s ORD operation in T1 and half of T2,
- EWR T3.
- DL McNamara main terminal at DTW (exclude the satellite terminal ops),
- LAX TBIT South concourse plus all of T4-T8.

YYC walking between A and D/E is comparable to the above mentioned airports. However as stated above, the typical WS guest is unlikely to connect at any of these options.

(5) Crisplant bag cart systems will be installing new items for the next four years. I wonder if WS is trying to get YYCAA to improve their domestic bag systems first.

One good aspect of the terminal transfer is the Crisplant can very quickly remove the legacy system from the old transborder operations on B. In theory, the airport could get an adequate number of checkin desks installed in the old transborder area and build the domestic Crisplant system first. Once operastional WS would move checkin desks to the new area and operates from their until such time as Concourse A bag belt system is replaced by Crisplant system. The biggest hangup would be getting Crisplant tunnel constructed from the international terminal to concourse B without screwing up AC bag belt system.

(6) OSS has the least favourable mention for Westjet. They don’t codeshare with BA anymore so no need for OSS off the LHR flight and onto WS domestic. Further KLM and WS would need to integrate their bag systems for OSS compliance in order to make OSS work. To date this has not been accomplished. Same goes for connect DL or AA to WS systems for OSS purposes. About the only usefulness of OSS is for WS to WS connections.

(8) The problem with transfer desk is that there is no useful purpose to WS operations. WS has no standby list to clear. Further to reseat pax in order to reunite family members or to give lap child pax an empty middle seat requires all pax to be at the gate. All other services have all ready been performed at the checkin counter.
(9) I have heard from both AC and now WS personnel that there were lots of difficult discussions between YYCAA and the airlines. At the end there appear to be many debates where both sides had to agree to disagree. For AC the main battle was over the MLL. YYCAA initially wanted to cut the MLL in ˝ and run the YYC Link service through the lounge.

I think I will settle into the lazy-boy for a some armchair quarterbacking.

(10) For Friday Dec 23rd there are 4 aircraft that arrive domestic but depart international. The turns average 1hr to 1.75 hr. The 3 airplanes around for at least 1.5 hours should not cause a towing problem. The remaining flight is a 1 hour connection that arrives at 8am from YEG and departs at 9am to CUN. CUN is a 5.5 block time for an 11 hour day. If the turn was broken up and YYC-CUN-YYC was all that was possible, the operating stats would still be impressive.

The arrive domestic and depart international are all morning fights. Some of the other origin cities are YOW, YYZ, and YVR. All these flights don’t speak to having many international connecting pax in YYC. Therefore there are a lot of pax arriving domestic and requiring YYC Link service back to bag claim area. Putting these aircraft at domestic terminal for arrivals would allow for a better pax experience.

The reverse is also true. There are four flights that arrive international but depart domestic. There is one aircraft arrival at 13:20, but the rest are late at night. Again, the schedule can be adjusted so that the international arrivals remain overnight while the domestic arrivals have the extra turn.

All in all adjusting the schedule is possible rather than relying on past practices and schedule times. I doubt there would be a 1 aircraft FTE impact to 8 turns out of 450 occurring daily in the WS system.

aerobod

Hi WR Cage, thanks for the review, I haven't gone into detail with our current movement state, 8 tows out of approximately 160 737 ground movements for 80 flights per day sounds about right. Although the number of aircraft tows are still relatively small compared with the total number of movements and some operational changes have happened since the 2009 simulation to try to alleviate the problem, the Operations Research team found that there was a significant interference between the towed aircraft and all other traffic movements around the terminal. Normal aircraft movements are effectively away from the terminal and have less effect than a towed aircraft that hugs the terminal and interferes a lot more with other pushbacks or taxi-ins. The Arena model that was run using the known taxi paths and blueprints for the terminal from 2009 was quite enlightening. The OR team reported to me at that time and had the blueprints spread over tables in my area for a long period of time, making it quite annoying every time I walked past them and thought about the problem.

When the traffic model was viewed, you could see all the relatively radial moves of the inbound and outbound flights, with the more circumferential moves from the tows causing significantly more pacing of the traffic flows, especially at busy times. The model was run against the terminal movements for the known schedules for all airlines using the terminal in 2009, versus a similar set of movements placed around the new gates and then existing gates, based on the blueprints. The need for approximately one additional aircraft for WS was based on the change in all traffic flows caused by towing interference. Since then there have been other changes to the business model that weren't anticipated then that have affected the schedule, Encore and 767 operations in particular, but the 2009 simulation was a point in time input into trying to make the terminal design more efficient for the way we operated then.

Error 601

When I look at the YYC Link vehicles they just don't make much sense to me either from a staffing or capacity perspective. Is it reasonable to assume that the selection of this "system" was dictated by floor loading and delivery constraints?

FlyerJ

The swing gates - 70 and 71 - seem to be an ongoing problem. It sounds like there are frequent operational problems with changing those gates between domestic and international use. And the passenger experience at those gates when used for domestic is pretty poor.

I don't understand why the D gates (and amenities area) need to remain totally segregated from the airport's domestic post-security concourses. Arriving international passengers are funnelled directly to CBSA ... so why the separation?

If arriving domestic pax coming in at 70/71 could just stroll directly to D-gate intl departures, it would be a better experience for both passengers and WS. And if domestic pax departing from 70/71 could access the D amenities (shops, restaurants, food court) it would be a much better passenger experience too.

The only reason I can think of for keeping domestic and international totally segregated at the D gates is because D pax can physically carry their duty free purchases out of the store ... but surely that's not the only reason for keeping those swing gates totally segregated?

FlyerJ

The Link system is frequently at full capacity - causing waits and frustration - so why is there one parked and gathering dust in front of the Marriott?

And it seems like - with increased distances, WS concerns and passenger complaints - YYC needs to drastically up their service levels with the 'regular' (non-YYC Link) golf cart transport service too. I've always liked the quaintness of the senior citizen volunteers in their white hats. But seeing them putz around in their golf carts (even having lengthy chats with people walking alongside them) just isn't cutting it any more. It seems like YYC needs more cart capacity (a) from the C arrivals escalator to the WS domestic bag carousels for 70/71 arriving pax, (b) from the central waiting hall down the long piers in D and E, and (c) from distant ITB gates into CBSA. That cart operation needs to be scaled up and 'professionalized'.

stevescott1983

Haven't been to the new YYC terminal yet, but this has my hopes up....usually on a travel day I struggle to hit my 10,000 steps on my fitbit...thanks YYC for solving this problem!!

Joking aside from reading thru this forum I am baffled at this waste of money. Coming from the coast it reminds me of when our government decided to design new fast ferries for a lot of money that didn't work when others already existed.