chgoeditor

Oh, you reminded me of another point I'd forgotten to make: For airports like Hong Kong's, a city air terminal makes sense because the vast majority of passengers are coming from Point A (Kowloon/Hong Kong Island) to Point B (the airport). And those that aren't coming from downtown are still approaching from the same direction.

But where would the OP locate an offsite center in more sprawling metropolitan areas where people approach the airport from many directions? I live about six miles north of downtown Chicago. I am NOT going downtown to check in for a flight at O'Hare. But nor am I going to drive past ORD to an offsite center in Arlington Heights or Schaumburg. My mother lives in central New Jersey. If she's flying out of EWR, she is not going to Manhattan or even Jersey City to check in for her flight. In a densely populated area, the notion of driving in the opposite direction from the airport or past the airport to check in/clear security is a ludicrous idea.

danielonn

If they did a City Air Terminal it would be located near the airport where there is space. There could also be a City Air Terminal in the city center as well.

cestmoi123

Again, why would this be any better than what's in place today? It sounds massively complex, like it will require huge amounts of manpower, lots of shuttle buses, and I don't see any benefit to it. Seems like you've just moved any concerns about congestion of cars and bus drop-offs to this remote location.

Carl Johnson

(much, much more deleted)

This is the worst solution ever devised to any problem ever encountered in all of human history and prehistory.

chgoeditor

Again, I don't think you have a practical understanding of the logistics necessary to accomplish such an exercise. O'Hare's most recent expansion involved a decade of litigation an an effort to acquire space near the airport. People's homes were taken by eminent domain and an entire cemetery had to be relocated. Granted, the expansion included new runways, but building an entire new complex would be virtually impossible near many major metropolitan airports because they are surrounded by residential and commercial enterprises that aren't easily relocated -- many of which exist near the airport because their business is aviation-related. And again, I know few people who would drive PAST the airport to go to the airport. It's a tremendous waste of time.

TWA884

FlyerTalk Rule 12.2:

WillCAD

I see what you're saying... instead of going through bag check and security at the airport, you go through bag check and security at an off-site facility, like the consolidated rental car facilities that many airports have been construction in recent years.

But it wouldn't solve the lines, not even a little bit, because the same number of people go through the lines, whether they do it on-site or off-site. You're just moving the security checkpoint and bag check farther away from the actual planes and adding a tremendously complex layer of transportation - of both people and baggage - to the process.

Unless you constructed at least two such facilities for an airport, which would then split the lines between them, the lines wouldn't get shorter.

Now, you might say, construct two and you've cut the lines in half! But no, not necessarily. The percentage of people who go to each of the facilities would depend on a huge number of factors, such as where they're built, how big they are, and how evenly distributed the airport's customer base is.

You might construct two equal facilities at equal distance from the airport, only to find that 80% of pax use one and not the other, because the airport draws 80% from the east side of town and only 20% from city center and the west side.

Or, you might construct one large facility in the heart of the area where the airport draws the most people, and a smaller in on in a small draw area, only to find that nobody wants to use the big facility because it's in a bad neighborhood, or it's got lousy parking, or the bus ride to the terminal is an hour, and they drive out of the way to swamp the smaller facility and overwhelm its facilities.

Consolidation is key. It's best to keep all air travel related functions in and around the airport itself for efficiency.

The best way to cut down TSA lines is to speed up screening, and the best way to speed up screening is to use faster, more efficient, more effective methodologies.

wrp96

The closest thing I can think of is the system that used to have in Vancouver that transported passengers by bus from cruise ships that had arrived from Alaska directly to the airport, allowing the passengers to skip having to do Canadian Customs at the pier and then again US immigration at the airport. The thing is the passengers still had to go through airport security, so the chokepoint is always going to be airport security.

And the reason it was stopped is that it cost too much money and created more issues than it helped.

chrisl137

That was it for me, too-- it only got more complicated and time consuming from there.

For reference for the OP-- I live about 30 minutes east of BUR. I've *driven* from my house to San Jose in about 4 hours.

When I fly from LAX, I typically leave my house 2 hours before my departure time from LAX-- the thought of having to be *at* the airport 3 hours before flying is horrific, especially since I tend to take early morning flights.

The whole proposal just adds a whole lot more standing in different lines, rather than shortening anything.

The way to shorten security waits is to make precheck the standard screening method and use what's now standard as the first level of SSSS screening. Doing that and coordinating staffing and number of lanes open to the known passenger traffic loads would make a big difference and probably cost less than now without any reduction in security.

GUWonder

Off-airport-side security screening is something I've seen at some places, and it's not a solution -- at least not a pretty one - for general airline passenger and passenger baggage security screening. It wouldn't work well in the US.

chgoeditor

Daniel (or should I say Radu Gidei), is that you?