HOW DO YOU GROW AN AIRPORT?

More than 75.9 million people fly into and out of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport every year. And more are coming through as time goes on. That makes Hartsfield-Jackson the busiest passenger airport in the world. You need a lot of space for airplanes, terminals, food service, souvenir shops, taxicabs, ground crews, cars, trucks, buses, trains ... and all of those people ... to move around in. So, when space gets tighter, you have to increase the space. That's what Hartsfield-Jackson is doing!

Do you know the size of the airport? Currently, It covers approximately 3,750 acres. That is about the size of 2,885 football fields placed side by side. Imagine that!!

The airport has a gigantic plan of action that includes: (1) adding another runway to the four that currently allow aircraft to take off and land all day and night, and (2) making other improvements that will help the airport better accommodate the needs of its growing number of passengers.

Construction of the fifth runway is a really big deal because it means that tons of things have to be shifted around, and a massive amount of hard work has to be done to make a 9,000-foot or 1.7 mile- long runway happen.

For starters, there's dirt, lots and lots of it, that has to be excavated and moved. Seven sites located in Clayton County will provide the dirt - all 27 million cubic yards of it - for the humongous project. To transport it physically from the excavation site to the runway site, a 5.5-mile long enclosed conveyor belt system that literally crosses over the expressway at I-285, near Sullivan Road, has already been set up. At the height of all of this earth moving activity, a total of 11 conveyors will be in operation moving 3,600 cubic yards of dirt per hour.

In addition to saving time on the project's completion, the engineers involved in the project are incorporating several scientific ways of keeping the noise down and minimizing the amount of pollutants released into the environment. That is the advantage of using a conveyor system for dirt-moving; an old-fashioned truck system would not be as fast nor as safe.

Now, this is the really neat part of the fifth runway story: the conveyor belt will actually be moved out of the way so that the runway/taxiway, itself, can be constructed on a bridge that crosses Interstate 285. That's right, in the year 2006, aircraft will land and take off atop 10 lanes of traffic whizzing along on the highway a few dozen feet below.

How do you hold up a 255,000 pound fully-loaded jetliner? The engineers have it figured out. They will reinforce the bridge in such a way that even jetliners that in the future could weigh substantially more (maybe over a million pounds) will be able to land and take off on the 5th runway.

What's the cost of this big ticket item, the fifth runway that is? $1.3 billion!!

Other exciting Hartsfield-Jackson expansion news includes:

Taxiway D will be relocated as part of this project; and aircraft parking gates and other support facilities will also be completed.

A lot of tower work is going on, too, including (1) constructing a new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control tower, which is made necessary by the addition of the fifth runway, and (2) moving the existing tower from its current location to accommodate the Concourse E expansion.

Find out more about the expansion by visiting:
www.atlanta-airport.com