Q&A with Massport CEO re: New England airports
 

A couple of interesting tidbits in here:

https://www.rocklandtrust.com/learni...nstallment--64

The people mover sounds interesting, and perhaps he's right that a commissary at BOS would help. But as the article states, any improvements have to be done inside the current footprint, which means they have to get very creative with possible problem-solving. An expansion of Terminal E sounds good if they can do it.

The comments about Worcester are a bit of a head-scratcher. Right now it has exactly one airline and exactly one destination you can get to, and while the CEO says it's a popular and financially-viable route for the airline (which I'll admit he's probably correct - Florida is a popular destination from New England in the winter, and vice versa in the summer), any expansion of either the building or the service at ORH is going to need a very strong commitment from another airline or a much bigger commitment from B6. Will either of those things happen? Well, it says Massport has owned the airport since 2009, so I'd say they're a little slow out of the gate (no pun intended - or maybe it is :p) if they want more service there.

The linked story below reports on upgrade to Category III ILS, after which ORH-JFK is supposed to start on Jet Blue, but not until 2018.
Jet Blue plans to adding flights to JFK from Worcester

Other information suggests the system will be IIIb, construction expected to be complete later in 2017. Maybe this will help attract other carriers back, maybe not.

They really should have built Terminal A to be able to handle international arrivals. Then they would not be running into all these issues with Terminal E now. Delta would not have to do this BS where they dump off international arriving passengers at E and then tow back to A for departure. Their partners could have relocated to A as well, which would make connections easier and free up more room at E.

Landside, Terminal E is pretty nice. So are the new A380 gates and the the E-C connector. It's good that they plan to build even more gates in the future. However, the old airside parts of E are very grim and not befitting of an international terminal in a city like Boston. The gates are cramped and views of the tarmac are poor. The lounges are depressing and have no windows at all. Really they just need to tear this part down and rebuild from scratch, but I don't see how they would be able to do this while handling the current international traffic.

They did build terminal A to handle international arrivals. As I understand it, there's still a big empty space in the basement where the CBP station was supposed to go. But CBP nixed it, saying they didn't want to staff two stations at Logan.

Manchester and Providence already have service to various hubs of the big four and Providence has some direct service to Florida. As the region grows - especially if Logan begins to hit certain capacity constraints due to its landlocked footprint - it seems likely that Worcester will begin to see similar service to what we now see out of Manchester and Providence.

Deleted

A people mover was part of the original "Logan 2000" plans that morphed into the Logan Modernization Project (around the time that 2000 started looking like a really unlikely completion date, IIRC). I don't know how they'd fit one in now.

I'd love to see the Terminal A FIS happen, but I don't see it being likely at this point. Maybe CBP will change their minds, but I wouldn't hold my breath....

Maybe there's space, but do the gates actually have the capability to separate arriving and departing passengers? I don't remember seeing this. Then again, I fly out of Teminal A very rarely, so easily could have missed it. However, if not, then there would need to be some serious building work done to accomodate this. And the satellite wouldn't be able to handle international arrivals unless there's a separate sterile tunnel.

It's not just Delta; it's pretty much every U.S. airline that flies internationally. AA international flights arrive at E, leave from B. What's more, this is standard operating procedure at every U.S. airport I've arrived at except ATL, which is basically a DL fortress. Staffing multiple terminals for international arrivals is too expensive to be practical and would require shuffling lots of people back and forth during the day to balance workloads. International terminals don't generally have space for all the flights they'd need to hold if aircraft stayed there until they were ready to depart. That would also require duplicate airline departure operations (check-in positions, gates, etc.). If you look at it from the overall system level, the current solution is the best even though it doesn't optimize each piece locally.

(BTW, Logan A reconfiguration to isolate arriving and departing pax is no more complicated than what LHR T3 dealt with successfully. There was construction, such as a barrier down the middle of the walkway between the near and far terminals, but IIRC nothing structural.) If anything, Logan TA has more room to work with.)

I know, but Delta has way more international flights than most US airlines at Logan, plus they are the only US airline at Logan to have a brand new terminal built specially for them. That is why I am focusing on them over other airlines.

I can think of plenty of counterexamples. LAX, JFK, MIA, MCO, EWR, and IAH are all airports with international arrivals in multiple terminals.

How would adding international arrivals at Terminal A require duplicate operations for any airline?

How is the current system good for anything except saving construction and CBP costs? US airlines have to tow their planes after every international arrival, and connections are harder because they require schlepping between terminals.

You're right that adding passenger separation after the fact is possible, LHR is a good example, there are other recent examples like AKL and AMS. Usually it entails adding another floor. The LHR renovation was definitely more complicated than adding a barrier down the middle of a hallway, you also need a way to get arriving passengers from the gates to the other side of that barrier without crossing paths with departing passengers. Anyhow I'm not arguing it's impossible, I'm just arguing it would be more difficult and expensive than building an immigration hall in the empty space.

This also exists in Washington Dulles C/D - essentially they build a corridor along the outside wall, leading to an exit to immigration (or, at IAD, to the moon buggies that take you to the immigration hall). At the end of each jet bridge there are two doors, one with access to the immigration corridor and one open to the departure hall. The gate agents close one or the other door as appropriate. Presumably Logan could have just a limited number of gates with this feature, and then move the planes just a few gates instead of all the way around the airport (or reserve those gates for the flights the international planes make a domestic turn).

At the time of your post there were two destinations - MCO and FLL. JFK was already announced, which will probably prove quite popular as you will finally be able to make connections to places other than Mexico/Central/South America. Also already announced was BOS to BWI by an upstart called Rectrix. Since, Rectrix has started a ORH to HYA flight, although that is technically an air taxi I think and does not go through security.

One of the big problems ORH has had is that too many morning flights get cancelled due to bad weather. That is what the Cat III is all about. So while I don't think any airline has yet felt confident enough to publicly announce plans to serve Worcester, I know in the past they manged to support quite a few commuter flights, so I could see an RJ or two showing up to ATL, PHL, or ORD.

As for gates, I think there are technically four jetway gates, although only two jetways exist at the moment. There are also a couple of ground gates, which would work well for the small planes likely to be flying into Worcester. I am not sure gate expansion is really important immediate so much as gate upgrades.