SALT LAKE CITY — The $3.6 billion rebuild of the Salt Lake City International Airport is now on a countdown, with less than a year to go until its first phase is slated to open to the public: Sept. 15, 2020.
With exactly 356 days to go until opening as of Monday, it’s now a race to the finish at the massive construction site, where crews are on a tight schedule to put finishing touches on the brand new airport meant to be a state-of-the-art replacement for Salt Lake City’s current hub.
Bill Wyatt, executive director of the Salt Lake City Department of Airports, has called the project “what is going to be America’s best airport.”
“It’s pretty exciting and pretty challenging,” Mike Williams, airport redevelopment program director, said Monday as he led a tour of the construction site for reporters.
The behind-the-scenes tour gave media the first glimpses of some of the nearly-finished facilities — including the already functioning baggage processing facility, where crews are now testing the sorting technology. The new system includes 6 miles of conveyor belts, which were whirring during Monday’s tour.
Drywall, paint, glass, flooring and other near-finishing touches have already taken shape in some areas, transforming the north and south concourses from what were once skeletal steel structures into what has begun to look and feel like an airport, with nearly-completed concession areas, seating areas, and vast hallways with already installed moving walkways.
“To see it looking more like a finished facility is exciting for us,” Williams said.
Monday, crews were hard at work in the terminal building and both concourses. In the south concourse, hammers and drills echoed as workers put finishing touches on windows and floors. In the north concourse, sparks flew as welders worked from the ceilings and heavy machinery beeped as they moved materials.
Also taking shape is what’s lauded as one of the new airport’s crowned jewels — a grand plaza area in the south concourse, where travelers can buy food from restaurants including the Market Street Grill and Pago and relax while watching planes land and lift off from a sweeping, 45-foot-tall wall of glass windows.
A U.S. flag hung suspended in the wall of windows while crews worked Monday.
“By this time next year we’ll have planes out front and people in here enjoying themselves,” he said. “It will be the new airport.”
Above the plaza, stretching all the way back across another set of glass windows and doors that separate the public from the secure area of the terminal building, is where a multi-colored art installation called “the Wave” will be installed, Williams said.
Already in place, lighting glowed from behind the walls up toward the ceiling where the Wave will be mounted.
Viewers can take a virtual tour of the future airport at the new airport’s website, where renderings show the Wave’s rainbow colors.
Standing in front of the plaza’s enormous window wall looking out across the future air strips, Williams said once the new concourses are open, work will begin to demolish the airport’s current facilities — so when travelers look out the window, they eventually won’t see the old airport facilities, but instead they’ll see Utah’s Wasatch Mountains.
“If you fast forward in time and think of the future, imagine that none of this will be here anymore and the view you get out the windows here will just be of the mountains and the planes,” Williams said.
Salt Lake City is one of the only cities in the world with the capability to build a new airport on new ground, rather than renovate its existing facility, Williams said. Salt Lake City’s current facilities are “overwhelmed,” he said, serving more than 26 million passengers in buildings that were built more than 50 years ago to handle half as many travelers.
The new airport is designed to be more efficient to prevent airplane bottlenecks and passenger delays. A single terminal featuring a centralized “Gateway Center” will streamline pickup and drop-off, check-in, security and baggage claim processes, Williams said.
No taxpayer dollars are being used to fund the redevelopment, according to airport officials. Instead, it’s being funded using a combination of airline and passenger fees.
The west side of the south concourse is scheduled to open to the public by the Sept. 15, 2020 deadline. The western north concourse’s opening, originally expected in perhaps late 2020 or early 2021, is now on schedule to open early in October 2020, Williams said.
Once both concourses are fully open — including the east segments of the concourses not slated for completion until 2024, after the old buildings are demolished — Williams said the airport will feature a total of 78 gates.
“Everything’s on schedule,” he said, although he didn’t downplay the challenge of coordinating more than 1,700 workers a day between the two concourses.
Also already installed are the first five passenger boarding bridges, at a cost of between $800,000 and $1 million each, Williams said.
Between now and opening day, Williams said project managers have scheduled more than 30,000 construction activities to be completed. Besides putting finishing touches on the outward interior of the buildings, Williams said the “biggest challenge” now is finishing technical inner-workings of the buildings, including security information technology systems.
“We’re in a milestone-a-day timeframe,” Williams said. “We have a lot of milestones to hit.”
Chandler McClellan, who manages crews working on the north concourse, said construction workers are on a 60-hour a week schedule to get everything ready for opening day.
“It’s a huge endeavor,” McClellan said. “A big endeavor.”