Airports of Tomorrow

Three sessions at the Seventy-Third Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board in January 1994 were devoted to future airports. This Circular is a compendium of the presentations by speakers at these sessions. It consists of three parts. The first deals with the planning and development of four very large new international airports in the cities of Denver, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Munich. The second part, entitled What Does it Take to be an International Airport?, addresses terminal building design, surface access, customs and immigration inspection facilities, and passenger concessions. The third part examines the general question of environmental protection standards and mitigation measures that apply to all airports but which are particularly important at very large airports handling millions of passengers per year. The underlying theme running throughout these presentations is that, as air travel grows, airports must keep pace not just in size but also in their complexity and level of technological sophistication. The new large airports now on the drawing boards are a quantum leap beyond those built as recently as two decades ago.