An evaluation of UK Airport Terminal Designs

[Coventrian]

Hi there,

I'm a year 3 student on the "Air Transport" course at Buckinghamshire New University, and also a budding pilot.

My latest assignment is for a module called "Airport Terminal Design and Innovation" and involves analysing the design of a UK airport terminal, I chose Birmingham terminal 1 (original I know).

Basically, I'm after passenger's opinions of the way a few different UK airport terminals are designed, I've been researching a few different airport review sites, but most reviews are focused around delay times etc.

Anyway, I'll be focusing around Birmingham terminal 1 (so don't post any reviews of Terminal 2 the Eurohub), and it's competitors, which I've chosen a Stansted, Luton, Heathrow T4, Manchester T1 and East Mids. If regular and non regular flyers from these airports (both passengers and pilots) could submit their experience of the design of these terminals it would be greatly appreciated.

The main thing I'm looking for is the ease of passenger flow from access to the terminal (airport rail stations, car parks, passenger drop off and coaches and buses) through to departures and then onto the aircraft, and vice versa for arrivals. Any information around lighting/natural light/crowding of areas/access to facilities/layout of shops etc is also welcomed.

Regards

Ben

[The Real Slim Shady]

Well East Mids is more of shopping mall than an airport terminal.

Getting There?

• No direct rail service.
• Good bus service though.
• M1 between Juncs 23 - 26 is extremely heavily congested, often closed due to accidents. EMA is Junc 24.
• Events at Donington racetrack adversely disrupt getting in and out. When the F1 GP comes we are stuffed!
• Passengers are directed to the eastern road entry which blocks up due to the short term car park barrier system.

Departures

• FR and EZY crammed in to small departures area in south of terminal
• baby and Charters in northern ( larger section)
• Funneling of pax to security leads to long queues at peak time
• Very limited seating in departures
• One coffee shop, 1 sandwich bar
• 3 entrance doors of the rotating variety tends to slow down flows
• Poor channeling of pax through entries means they stop as soon they get in the terminal and block the doorway

No comments about security due sensitive nature

Post security

• Welcome to the shoping mall! To reach any gate you have to go through the shops
• long linear terminal with gates on north, outlets on south
• New western terminal has no facilities, only gates.
• All gates are walk / bus to aircraft
• Boarding delays common due to arriving aircraft and crossing pax streams

Thats a start for you

[AMM626]

Non regular flyer (around 2-3 times per year) from Birmingham, not flown in the past year though so I'll go on past experience.

Car parks are pretty good (if somewhat expensive) with a short walk to the terminals from the multi stories, and although I've never used it, the buses seem pretty regular from the long stay. I've arrived by rail once and it's very convenient, one stop from Birmingham New Street and a short 90 second trip on the skyrail and you're in the building. The drop off area has seen a bit of controversy with charging £1 for 20 mins but I don't have a problem with it, the area is right outside the front of terminal and is way better than queueing to get down that narrow road. Never arrived by bus or coach so can't comment.

The main check in area is bright and spacious, but the extension to it (think it's desk numbers 60+) is very narrow, which is fine for the likes of Lufthansa where people wander up, check in and then go, but when there's a holiday flight queueing it is very difficult to get past. The far end where Emirates use is ok as it widens again. The upstairs departure area is ok although I don't spend much time there. Security channels are better than before but can get very busy, I have queued down as far as Frankie & Bennies before, but that can be down to staffing levels rather than design.

Departure lounge is bright enough but it is with artificial light, the natural light has now gone since Dixons and Alpha expanded and took up the space by the windows overlooking the airfield. The shop layouts take up a large area and it can feel a little cramped at busy times.

Going to and from your aircraft can either be a pleasant experience or a nightmare depending on which pier you depart from. Pier A is quite simply awful, it's old, dull, dark and way too small for purpose. The waiting lounge for EK38 was way too small for an A330, I hate to think what boarding the 773 must be like. Good progress is being made though on the construction of it's replacement, I don't think anybody will be sad to see this go next year. Pier B is the total opposite, with a glass front that lets lots of natural light into the waiting areas, and it feels so much more spacious in comparison.

On arrival the Immigration area is bright and spacious, I've always passed through pretty quickly except once when the queue was up the stairs and halfway down the pier. The baggage reclaim is quite dull but guess it serves it's purpose, I always thought it was a little small at busy periods but I think they may have added an extra belt or 2 since I was last there.

Leaving the airport is fairly easy, a short ride to the railway station or a short walk to the car park. The road system is generally adequate but it can clog up when there's a large show finishing at the NEC, I think improvements are on the cards though.

Hope that helps.

[Hartington]

T4

Until recently I lived in Maidenhead. Access to T4 by public transport is not good from that side. You can take a local train to Hayes and then change to go to Heathrow or the 74 bus (takes over an hour) to central area followed by Heathrow Express to T4 By car the obvious route is M4/M25/Southern Perimiter Road but the motorways can be pretty unhelpful at times so it pays to know the back roads. Even if Airtrack gets built access from that part of the Thames Valley past Slough abd Maidenhead as far as Reading will remain poor.

Long Term parking for business is suprisingly close to the terminal and I have walked it on a couple of occasions (10 minutes). However, cost is such that anything more than a one day trip (not even overnight) and it was cheaper to taxi. I tried the other car park just once - never agin, it's in the back of beyond.

Once inside it's all very gray which I've always put down to a legacy from the BA interior colour scheme of the time when the terminal opened. Prior to the opening of T5 the terminal was becoming seriously congested. It's not worth trying to separate checkin from security from anything else the whole terminal was a zoo. However, it's now more like a ghost town.

Maybe fsmilisrity breeds contempt but I always liked T4. The congestion was a pain and the walk to some gates was a bit long but I never had any serious problems with the layout. The management of the terminal was something else. Quite apart from the congestion stand allocation/changes meant that there were several occasions when I found myself hustling from one end to the other.

As with most BAA terminals I felt the shopping had been allowed to overtake the basic reason for the existence of the terminal and, as time went on and more passengers went through the place and they built more shops so the congention got worse.

The other issue with T4 has always been where it is. If your aircraft lands on the northern runway (and when landings over Windsor are in use you always land on 9L the northen runway) it takes an age to taxi to the crossing point of the southern runway. Then you hold for crossing clearance then you hold again because your stand isn't free and finally you wait for the buses. Bussing and waiting for a stand should currently not be an issue but the rest of it remains an issue for T4.

Arriving has become slower in recent years but that has affected all airports as entry checking has been tightened up. I only had an issue with baggage delivery times once and that was on a delayed flight very late at night.

[PAXboy]

I have been using LTN for over 20 years, usually for domestic and near European. My mother lived in the IOM for 26 years and this was my usual route, also, I commuted to EDI for six months in 2001.

In short: It was the best little airport. Following construction of the new terminal it is one of the worst.

Access: I have always used car as I lived close by. The new access road is still being built but the complete and utter clanx up of the main road into the terminal area means that it will never run smoothly. I won't detail it now, either ask me for more, or check into the Airports, Aircraft & Routes forum. Car parks are increasingly expensive - they have learnt that from BAA. The set-down/pick up is just terrible and, again, ask for more detail as I am trying not to make this too long and besides, if I write too much about how bad LTN is, it will do terrible things to my blood pressure.

Terminal: You enter on the Left and cross to the Right for check-in desk then return to the Left to go up to security. The main gangway from the check in to the security barrier is only about 3.5m wide (I sit to be corrected) and hemmed in by shops and cafe with people emerging from them to slow the pax hurrying to the escalators/lifts and steps for security.

Once through security (not too bad) you find that you have crossed again to the Right hand side. The problem being that many of the gates on the Left hand side but - because of security, you now have to walk three sides of a square to get there. The time and distance is enormous.

As you are walking around to the distant gates, you realise that the corridors are made very cheaply and are cold in the winter. There are NO travelators anywhere. Why? They cost money and mean that the corridors have to be wider and that makes them more expensive too. For older people that do not yet need a wheel chair, it is a terrible airport.

Lastly, they have made the same mistake that all modern terminals (inc LHR T5) in the choice of flight info display boards. They use flat panel PC screens set vertically. These cannot be read when you are more than 2.5/3m away. That means that you cannot sit on a seat (find one first ) and look at the nice big 'flik-flak' board for your flight. You have to get up and cross over to get within reading distance of the flat panels - then go back to your seat, if not yet taken by another. This adds to personal sense of frustration and certainly to the congestion of people milling around trying to see if there is an update on their flight.

Now, before I explode, I'll sign off, ask for more detail if you need but LTN now gets me only because it is many times further to STN (which also used to be good and is now worse).

[VAFFPAX]

Luton:

Where the post-waiting area gangways are concerned, I will second Paxboy. That was just a shocking let-down after LTN made such a fuss about its redevelopment. But let's start at the beginning:

Getting there: Luton and the Highways Agency are redeveloping the access to the airport, mostly because of the A1081-A505 screwup around the airport.

The M1 spur that then becomes a dual-carriage A1081 past Capability Green, but then just before the roundabout to Luton Parkway merges into a normal single-lane road. The redevelopment appears to widen the stretch between Capability Green and the Airport Way/Vauxhall Way roundabout by the airport, in addition to the airport getting a flyover which should alleviate traffic. Currently you have to go round the roundabout and take the third exit.

Parking around Luton is not bad, but it is not cheap. The long term parking places run regular bus services, but they are miles away from the airport (I do mean miles... beyond the proper M1). Rail service is from Luton Parkway, with regular bus services. It's further away than BHX's station is from the BHX terminals.

Terminal layout: Generally not too bad, land-side anyway. Check-in hall is big and spacious. You have a selection of food joints, WiFi is available too. To get to departure gates, you use the escalators to the security check, which in itself is not too bad either. Obviously, if plenty of charters are leaving at the same time, you do get a traffic jam there, but it's nowhere near as bad as Bristol would be.

Past security, you go through a corridor into the redeveloped waiting area. It is airy and littered liberally with shops. The gates are all to one end, which leads you to wondering what the architects were on when they designed it. That's where Paxboy is quite correct - the gangways are narrow, cold, poorly designed. The gates are usually on ground-level, so you have to take narrow stairs down to the area there, which none of them are designed for more than 50-60 people. Everyone crams in anyway, and it looks like a holding pen for animals.

On arrival, there are separate streams for those from Ireland/Channel Islands/Domestic and those from overseas, but you end up in the same Baggage Hall. Baggage Hall is not too badly designed, it's an improvement on what used to be the baggage hall. Arrivals is below the security checks for departures, so it is reasonably spacious, and you can either mix and mingle with the departing people, or exit to the buses.

S.

[Ad C]

Not sure how useful it will be, but Kent International Airport at Manston published a masterplan earlier in the year. It can be found on their website. It covers everything incluiding access.

[WHBM]

One of the greatest innovations for terminal design would be to place security, instead of being at the first opportunity as soon as you pass check-in, to have it at the latest opportunity, at the gate immediately prior to boarding the aircraft.

There are a few airports (principally in Asia) who do this. It is amazing the benefits given (you may care to start a list; it will be lengthy).

The quantity of security staff and equipment required is NOT grossly increased, their productivity per shift appears broadly similar to the current approach. Those who claim it is inefficient have not thought it through. It's a question of organisation.

[Atlantean1963]

WHBM,

NO, NO, NO, A MILLION TIMES NO!!!!

Sorry - I may have over-reacted a tiny bit there ; but they used to do this at the old T1 at CDG (might still do - haven't been there for a while) and it was a nightmare.

It used to take ages to get through security, and because the staff would have to move from gate to gate, there would be a queue at the gate before boarding, and on more than one occasion flights I was on were delayed because they couldn't get all the pax through security in time. Then, once past security there were no facilities whatsoever in the holding pen (and I chose that word deliberately).

In fact, it got to the stage where it was quicker and less stressful for me to drive from the centre of Paris to Didcot via the Chunnel than fly from CDG.

So I can't see any benefits - but I'm an open-minded sort of person. What would be on this lengthy list of yours?

Best Regards,

Atlantean.

[Capot]

There are a few airports (principally in Asia) who do this. It is amazing the benefits given

There are some in Europe too, and they all stand out for the time it takes to get into the boarding gate area.

The system works badly for all the reasons given by Atlantean; there's one such airport where the queues for the gates becomes intermingled, although for the life of me I can't remember which one! But I can see the scenes of chaos in my mnd's eye now.

There's another which happens to combine this security system with relatively frequent gate changes, for some reason; the only thing to do then is sit down and watch the fun for a minute or twenty, then go through the new gate last. Then of course there's a two-hour delay waiting for the new slot, then FTL cuts in, then.......you know the routine.

Now I'm here, a word on terminal design; airports exist to transfer passengers and cargo as expeditously as possible between air and the other modes of transport. They have no other purpose whatsoever.

Their transformation in the mid-1980's into shopping malls began, to its shame, with the BAA, under the excuse that the extra revenue would allow them to keep airport charges down. This was never, ever, true. The retailers never-the-less took charge, and now new airports are designed by BAA and many others to serve primarily as shopping malls, not to move passengers quickly. (I worked for BAA in the 1980s and became very unpopular by refusing to agree that increasing "dwell time" was a desirable objective for BAA to have. I got nowhere and had to quit.)

In the early part of this century, I obtained a costing for a design and build" terminal in UK of 3,500m2 capable of 1m passengers a year and, more importantly a "30th busiest hour" flow of 500 each way, with comfortable waiting/catering for an additional 500 in serious delay situations. Up to and including the structure, relocatable internal partitions and doors, aircon/heating, lighting, plumbing incl fully fitted washrooms everywhere, and decorative finishes, the quoted total cost was £2.25m. The required standard was "B&Q Megastore" in style and finish. The comparable cost of a BAA-commissioned 1m passenger building would have been about 500 times as much. The difference is largely due to the fact that the "B&Q" building provided for essential retail outlets and catering only, placed out of the main flow paths. (And no architect was involved promoting a grandiose design; the structure was a standard one.)

What has happened at many airports is that the retail outlets demand huge areas of space, which is either taken from passenger movement space or added to it. If the latter, there is then an additional contstruction cost which is never, ever justified by the additional net profit to the airport that it generates. BAA and others, encouraged by architects and retailers, have suffered since the '80s and still suffer from the delusion that the retail contributes to their business. When every single factor is considered this is clearly nonsense.

There are many economic benefits that stem from speeding up passenger flows by a factor of 2 or 3, just one of those being that you then need half or even a third of the space you would need with a lot of retail. It isn't just the shops' space you save. With faster flows and thus fewer people waiting you need much smaller departure areas.

It should never take more than 15 minutes to get from the concourse to the gate. With old-style check-in gates disappearing, multiple self-service fast bag-drops (NB not check-in desks disguised as bag drops) and little retail, distances will be shorter and unobstructed. Passengers need only be given a latest time to arrive at the gate, as happens now with many airlines, about 20 minutes before STD.

There is no law of nature that says airports must provide space for "designer-label" shops selling over-priced tat to gullible fools who could buy it cheaper in the High St. That includes the myth of "Duty Free" goods; most airports' mark-ups result in a price that's higher than the High St price for duty-paid goods.

Mind you, accepting that security is with us for ever, it's time that new-build terminals recognised that and installed security systems that do not create queues, even at peak times. IE, 3 or 4 times the present provisions of space, equipment and staff, perhaps more.

I hope that I have encouraged you to research the economics of terminals with a bare minimum of retail, designed for passenger transfer and nothing else. You may find that the net cost per passenger is much less without the "contribution" from retail.

[VAFFPAX]

I have to second Atlantean here - NO for security as late as possible. Berlin Tegel has that kind of approach, and their post-security waiting rooms are sparse and not all that pleasant.

And Atlantean, please tell me you're not back to flying into CDG are you? I've given up doing the trek to BRU or CDG by plane because the two hours that it takes me from St Pancras to Bruxelles-Midi or Gare du Nord is definitely worth it if I practically immediately get to where I need to be. :-)

S.

[TerminalTrotter]

As an infrequent flier, I am 100% with Capot. Every D airport seems to regard retail as their primary customer. Imagine if you went to catch a bus at the bus stop outside your house and had to put up with this nonsense. Never mind a third runway at Heathrow. close the shops and concentrate on getting on the aircraft! Then you can argue whether or not the airspace is congested. Airports are a means, not an end.

[Atlantean1963]

Hi Vaffpax,

Thank you for your concern! No, I never fly to CDG now. I either take the train, or I still drive - especially if I need to call in to Tesco at Cité Europe for some essential supplies for Mrs. Atlantean

Best Regards,

Atlantean.

[PAXboy]

YES to Atlantean1963
YES to Capot
The only problem is that ... nothing is gonna change.

At the big locations, the myth of retailing cash will hold sway and, besides, for the money men it's more fun than aeroplanes.

At small, regional ones, they might try the small is beautiful approach but it will be an uphill job.

Unfortuantely, we have all of the new terminals that we are going to need for the next ten years (forget LHR 6) and the next round of opportunities in this country will be after this (very bad) recession. If someone needed to build a terminal now, they would probably still go for the shopping mall because they think it will bring in money and, to a degree it does. The cash flow is there - what cannot be proved is how much people would like the place if it was not there. You have to prove a negative. Lastly, those who like and dislike shopping, is only the regulars that dislike it? Do the occasional travellers like the shops?

[WHBM]

Originally Posted by PAXboy

. Lastly, those who like and dislike shopping, is only the regulars that dislike it? Do the occasional travellers like the shops?

Actually no. I am constantly amazed when passing through Stansted, for example, at the so-called high end retail stores with nobody in them at all. For goodness sake, Stansted is low-cost territory. Squandering the terminal floorspace on trying to sell designer handbags is bad enough, but just look as you pass how many people are in there buying - none ! Meanwhile the one (only) small restaurant where you can actually sit and eat a normal meal is invariably full with a queue, even at non-meal times like 16.30. How on earth can an airport operator get things like this so wrong, let alone pretend to be good at retail opportunities.

[Coventrian]

Thanks for all the replies, they are going to be very helpful in "critically analysing" the different elements of these terminals and I'll be taking different quotes from these threads to comment on how the different designs have different advantages and disadvantages over each other. Now I must go bash my head against a wall for a few days as I try to fill the assignment criteria....

Again, its greatly appreciated, my lecturer should accept comments made on this forum as being more credible compared to the crappy review sites you find over the internet.

Ben

[PAXboy]

benlapworth, 'enjoy' and do stop by some time and tell us what happened. The nature of threads are that there may be more comments later.

[liteswap]

Another vote for Capot's elegant and tightly argued rant.

Airports are for getting people from plane to car/bus/taxi/train. The way that shops -- sorry retail outlets -- intrude on this process is both extremely irritating and cynical and, combined with the forcefeeding of stimuli there and en route, is enough to make anyone with a modicum of brain cells feel like they've been minced through a giant sausage machine by the time they reach their destination. Horrid.

Can't wait for the day when I never have to fly again....

[PIK3141]

''Security'' should not be at the gate, nor where it is at the moment. It should be at the entrance doors to the terminal, the way the Russians do it. With sufficient entrance doors and sufficient staff to make sure a queue / bottleneck never builds up. And if you don't understand why, then I'm not going to explain !

[liquid sunshine]

I really don't understand why some people get so upset about shops at an airport. If you don't want anything.....just walk on by. I think people need to realise just how expensive it really is to operate an airport. At many of the airports frequented by loco's the airports give heavily discounted or free landing fees to attract the airline and routes you all desire. So what areas do you suggest that these airports actually raise revenue from?