dca lovers
 

"The GAO estimated that flights to eight new destinations Congress added this year may carry as many as 1,245 new daily passengers."

i sort of thought they use airbus a320 and boeing 757's for the west coast. those planes hold about 125-150 each. presuming 80% load, 2000 more passengers if only one flight each day.

i like the comment 25min to tsa sign.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...0_story_1.html

Neither Congress nor the Aiports Authority want to deal with the larger problem. They focus on the # of rotations, not the # of pax. When DL did its slot swap for LGA, nobody peeped when it substituted 757's into its much fewer slots. The impact on flight operations isn't much (a bit of spacing wake turbulence), but the impact on the terminals, from parking to check-in to checkpoints to room at the gates hasn't been dealt with.

And, the lack of an airside corridor makes life worse every day. And, not sure there's a great solution such as a tunnel given that the whole airport is built on landfill.

what's the landfill problem? i am familiar with construction of national airport.

most auto tunnels are on less than fill.

The same article mentions that the percentage of US arrivals who are connecting has gone from 18% to 40% -- presumably, those are additional passengers from their expanded operations.

Tunneling and excavation are never cheap, but get much more expensive when done in areas below the water table -- like the sea-level muck beneath DCA. You need to continuously keep water out of the hole, which requires pumping 24/7 and lots of additional concrete.

This is likely the answer. I'm told that tunnelling is essentially not viable given the disruption it would cause for lengthy periods of time to existing operations. I do wonder whether there's any chance of turning what was the temporary US/DL terminal (old hangar, now offices) into a temporary terminal again if the tunnel option were ever to come to pass.

How many passengers are actually inter-airline transferring? I'll bet not a ton. Most of the xferring is likely at the US Airways side of the operation - and they have a shuttle bus that runs from the north pier to the middle pier every 5 minutes now.

if the tunnel is too difficult, why not a flyover. few escalators, and a high walkway???

Don't give MWAA any ideas! If they bring back the Interim Terminal, I worry that it would become National's answer to IAD's permanently-interim C/D concourses.

8 new designations do no necessarily mean 16 flights. two of the mcclain sites phx and lax have 6 flights each so maybe 40-50 flights.

who told you that.they could put in a deep tube that never surfaced. dc has a lot of tunnels. the 3rd st probably the best known. that was put in through the fill of the tiber river.

there is a considerable amount of unused space between the ticketing counters and the east windows. that would be plenty of space for an elevated walkway between gates 10 and 45. been a long time since i was in the old terminal, but if i get the design contract, i'll get right on a design for an interconnect to gates 1 to 9 to the rest of the terminal.

as most already know, i am very much in favor of extending both runways an additional 10,000 feet to make them 747/777 serviceable, for the a380. would have to pave way out to the east to allow ground clearance for those big guys.

Or you could just install catapults and arresting wires on the current runway :)

I'm not sure how you'd get a walkway placed really anywhere without MAJOR renovations and/or destruction. You can't just slap up some stairs and a walkway.

Any walkway has to 1) be sterile, 2) ADA compliant, and 3) cost reasonable. Without spending MILLIONS of dollars and tunneling under the tarmac between the three terminal piers, I'm very much at a loss to see how this could be done

first your sentence structure is not so good. second, how much for the bridge to nowhere? get serious, we're talking about making a walk space for YOUR congressperson!!!

This is MWAA's ball of wax, not Congress'. Congress doesn't trust anyone on the MWAA board to guard a sewer these days - given the debacle over the Silver line.

With a threat of sequestration, I don't think you're going to see a lot of willingness to dole out money for MWAA to waste.

And remember, this discussion relates primarily to -connecting- passengers. Congressmen aren't connecting through DCA...