Steve Domino found himself at a sleepy little airfield when he stepped onto the tarmac at Salt Lake City Airport on his first trip to Utah 24 years ago.
"I thought I was in Casa Blanca," jokes Domino, who today as director of planning for the now-perennially booming Salt Lake Inter-na-tion-al Airport heads a push to turn it into a vast new facility that would barely resemble its current state, much less the drowsy backwater it was in 1972.Domino on his maiden flight into Salt Lake City made his local entrance as everyone did in those days - by walking from plane to terminal. Bridges that link airplane cabins to airport concourses didn't appear in Salt Lake City until 1980, two years after U.S. airlines were deregulated in a move that changed the character of air travel in America.
With deregulation came the creation of hubs, like the one established at Salt Lake City in 1982 by Western Airlines, a company later swallowed by Delta Air Lines. And with the creation of hubs came hordes of travelers lured by low-cost fares that only got cheaper as price wars escalated in the late 1980s and continue even now.
All the bustle has made Salt Lake International nearly obsolete, despite expansions in the 1970s and 1980s, say airport administrators and airline officials.
"To put it bluntly, Delta Air Lines has outgrown the current facility," said Dave Graves, Delta's regional director for airport customer service.
This month the airline, which controls 60 percent of the local market with 176 daily landings and departures at Salt Lake City, will set a passenger record for the 20th consecutive month.
Delta's surge is part of a larger trend: Some 19 million travelers went through the airport in 1995, marking a double-digit increase for the fifth year in a row. The number will likely top 20 million in 1996 and approach 25 million by the turn of the century, according to forecasts by the Federal Aviation Administration.
This outlook is what spurs expansion talk, though Deputy Director John Wheat said the staff-recommended, $1.7 billion proposal is strictly in conceptual form and has yet to be approved by airport directors.
"We have no commitments, no nothing," said Wheat.
Board chairman Don L. Skaggs in a recent interview said nonetheless that members of the airport's governing body are casting a favorable eye toward the expansion proposal.
Skaggs even mentioned it in the same breath as the Winter Olym-pics, which Salt Lake City will host in 2002.
"We will not have the airport torn up during these Games," said Skaggs, hinting that the board might push for completion of Phase I (see diagram on A1) before 2002.
The just-completed master plan being considered by directors calls by the year 2001 for some $500 million to $600 million in improvements that would include a third major terminal, a 4,000-space parking deck and the replacement of two, 13-jet concourses with a 37-jet concourse.
"Of the eight or 10 options we explored, this was the most promising," said Domino, explaining the project would proceed in a way that would let current terminals be used during construction.
Further build-out would add 70 or more gates and occur in phases over 20 years.
The project would completely reconfigure the airport, eliminating "finger piers" left over from when Salt Lake City was a mere origin-and-destination market. Carriers find the current arrangement inefficient, and say they would be better served by long, straight concourses less susceptible to airplane traffic jams.
"Several times during the day we have more flights on the ground than we have at the gates," said Graves, noting that bottlenecks routinely form around packed Delta concourses.
Similarly, the second-biggest player in the Salt Lake market applauds expansion.
"Some airports almost have a field-of-dreams attitude that if they build large terminals and there's no immediate demand they feel passengers and airplanes will come," said John Chaussee, the Dallas-based senior manager of airport properties for Southwest Airlines.
This, according to Chaussee, is not how it works, however, and overbuilding has been the bane of more than one U.S. airport.
Still, he said that Southwest, which has a local market share of about 30 percent, backs what airport planners propose.
"The airport management there has always been conservative . . . we support management's plans because they have assured us they would expand only to meet actual growth."
Growth in fact has been phenomenal at Salt Lake International in recent times. Five years ago, about 12 million travelers used the airport, small potatoes compared with this year's numbers, even smaller next to airport projections that say the head count will reach 36 million in 14 years.
Domino said such forecasts are based on local economies, population, personal income and job opportunity, all variables expected to mushroom steadily in Utah over the next 20 years.
Wheat noted that the airport - like most around the country - pays for its growth and daily operating costs largely through levies charged airlines for each plane that lands in Salt Lake City.
Concessions, to a much lesser extent, add to airport coffers, and federal grants often subsidize capital improvements.
He said nothing being considered would raise local taxes (though in December 1994 the airport began imposing for three years a $3 tax on every locally purchased ticket to pay for some $60 million in improvements).
"This will be funded with user fees," said Wheat, though he was quick to concede that airline operating costs would likely be passed on to travelers.
He also cautioned that despite the attention it has garnered, expansion like that envisioned remains little more than a drawing-board proposition.
"Actual construction and master plans are two different animals," said Wheat. "But if the forecasts get there, I'm sure we'll have to build some things."