strife

How did they renumber the gates and still make F20 further than F21 and F22?

DELee

Dyslexia?

David

Starman

I departed SFO from new F16, old 85 yesterday morning (the first few hours of the new system) and have to say I was impressed at how cleanly they had swapped all the signage. Not only was the terminal signage perfect, with no traces of the old system, but on the pilots' guides they had even repainted the tarmac label blocks at the start of each taxi guideline lane to each gate. There must have been rehersals plus a considerable crew to do this all in a few hours.

STS-134

They literally replaced every gate sign. When I flew in/out of SFO about 2 weeks ago, all of the gate signs had temporary numbers stuck on them. To make the change, I think they just went and ripped off all of the temporary numbers overnight.

nomad420

Saw that, I don't get the numbering system at the end of that terminal. Overall I think it is an improvement but......

lincolnjkc

There's a series called "Ultimate Airport: Dubai" or something along those lines and a while back DXB renumbered all of their gates -- that's exactly what they did in that situation: Get new signage in place during the weeks leading up to the transition with the old numbers temporarily installed and at "go" time a group of people go through ripping down the temporary numbers.

What I hadn't thought of before that episode was the electronic implications as well (GIDS/FIDS and making sure all of that is updated "instantly" at cutover time)

higher_flyer

Such as the United app terminal map, which wasn't updated until later?

emcampbe

At YYZ T1, they renumbered all the Gates a few years ago from 3 digit numbers to two digit numbers by keeping the last two digits and prefacing them with D for domestic departures, F for US departures and E (I think?) for international. They have a few swing gates that can be used for either domestic or US, so can be, say D54 if it’s a domestic departure, or F54 if a US departure. At other times, they use the international gates for US departures, so, say, E70 becomes F70. Not sure how the signs are really set up, can’t remember - they definitely are lights for the numbers so maybe they can change them that way.

on the other hand, UA flight status often has the old gate numbers listed for arrivals when they first list it, and then it changes to the current. Currently, the 10:00 pm arrival tonight from ORD says it is coming into gate 191, but that gate no longer exists - it’ll change to F91 at some point.

My flight into SFO tomorrow says we’re coming into E11 - so I think that’s the new wing, that we’re formally numbered in the 60s.

HkCaGu

Many airports have different numbering schemes for pilots/tarmac personnel versus passengers/ground agents. I'm glad SFO changed everything simultaneously.

Zorak

Guess they noticed this -- I received another email this morning, identical to the previous one except adding a link.

Silver Fox

They also seem to have overlooked this when my boarding pass was emailed to me:

San Francisco terminal update

United flights arrive at and depart from Terminal 3 Gates 60-90 and International Terminal Gates 91-102.