HEL is my final new terminal this year which was undergoing significant construction – terminals 1 and 2 were both being expanded.
As with FLL and FAY, I couldn’t solely use imagery in order to do this one; I couldn’t find any high-quality imagery for the above expansion points. For references, I also ended up having to use as many photos and videos of the airport as I could find. YouTube videos of people filming out the window while taking off, landing, and taxiing were particularly helpful.
My favorite part of this terminal is probably the 7-shaped portion on the right; I like that they chose to effectively create a pair of linear terminals, each parallel to their nearest runway.
This has apparently been the year where I decided to collect airports under construction – not just FAY, but FLL (and HEL, which I still need to draw). FAY was replacing half of the airside concourse when I first flew through there earlier this year.
I’ve been waiting for aerial image sources showing the new concourse, but with it reaching the end of the year, I had to start looking for other sources, and eventually came across the Fayetteville Airport twitter feed, which had a nice drone video of the terminal construction.
An aerial view of the construction of our new Concourse and rotunda, that will be opening in July 2019! pic.twitter.com/y9qvvRrVF5
— Fayetteville Airport (@flyFAYairport) May 29, 2019
Between that, the outdated imagery, and photos I could find of the project, I was able to piece together enough information to properly draw the terminal.
Though I first flew through FLL over half a year ago, I’d put off drawing the terminal because Concourse G (the southernmost concourse) was under construction, and all the reference imagery I could find was still pre-construction.
As it’s approaching the end of the year, where I’ll need the silhouettes of all new airports I’ve visited for my year in travel post, I checked again and was able to find enough material to draw Concourse G. I’ll likely have to update the terminal in the future to fully capture the completed construction, but what I’ve drawn is pretty close to the state of FLL earlier this year.
Other than the reference imagery issues, this was a pretty easy terminal to draw; there were very few curves and all but Concourse E (the northwestern concourse) were at right angles to each other. I liked how the sunshades over the landside roadway looked, so I decided to include them.
After a visit to BOS this week, I noticed that Terminal B had undergone some construction work, making the western half wider. Comparing my BOS terminal silhouette to reference imagery, I could see that a few other changes had been made to various terminals as well, so I updated the terminals and converted the silhouette to my new color scheme.
Since BOS was one of my earlier terminal silhouettes, I also took the opportunity to clean up the entire drawing (mostly ensuring that parallel and collinear lines were, in fact, parallel and collinear).
I decided to include the landside terminal walkways this time, as they’re reasonably prominent in satellite imagery, and the terminal looked better with them.
First of all, I’ve updated the color scheme of my terminal silhouettes. Before, the terminal was a lighter gray on a white background, and relied on an outline to give it the contrast it needed from the background. However, I’ve always felt the outline distracted from some of the details of the terminal design, and I wanted to switch to a pure silhouette – so I’ve made the terminal much darker so it doesn’t need an outline, and I went ahead and made the background itself slightly darker so it isn’t as harsh as before.
MIA itself was enjoyable to draw, even if it took a while. All of the angles on the interior of the terminal loop are 150°, which means that the concourse piers are generally a nice even 30° off of each other – for example, the angles between Concourses F and G or G and H are 30°. (The eastern part of Concourse E is itself rotated 10° off of perpendicular, but the western satellite of Concourse E is aligned to the 30° pattern.)
No two concourses used the same design – I’m assuming they were all built at different times with no real regard for maintaining a common layout.
Concourse D is enormous. I’d speculated when I visited MIA that it was nearly as long as Detroit’s (DTW) Concourse A. Now that I’ve drawn it, I can overlay them and see that MIA Concourse D is actually slightly longer if MIA’s small jet piers are included. (Even if they aren’t included, the walking distance in MIA is longer due to the two bends in the concourse.)
I’ll need to go back and update my previously drawn terminals to the new color scheme; hopefully I’ll be able to do so over the next few months.
One of my earliest posts when I started this blog in 2013 discussed how I’d been to all but six of the FAA-designated large hubs in the US, and I was only missing six: IAH, MDW, SAN, TPA, FLL, and MIA. Over the years, I’d managed to visit the first five, and this week I finally picked up MIA as well, completing my collection of large US hub airports.
I’d originally scheduled a 2 hour and 45 minute layover to give myself time to explore the airport, but my incoming flight was delayed and I only ended up getting about two hours. However, it ended up being enough, because in my reading up about MIA pre-trip, I’d somehow managed to miss that the concourses weren’t all connected behind security. With my AA boarding passes, I’d only be able to see concourses D and E airside.
D was quite long – while I don’t believe it’s quite as long as the main terminal at DTW, it’s the only airport I can recall visiting a single concourse with four of its own train stations.
E was interesting with its bizarre pier and satellite structure, where instead of the satellite train connecting to the close end of the pier, it connected to the root of the pier, with the tracks running over the roof of the length of the pier.
Concourse E, with the satellite on the right and the pier on the left.
Since D and E didn’t take the whole layover time to explore, and since I had PreCheck to expedite security, I also went ahead and exited the secure area to visit the ticketing, baggage claim, and parking structure areas.
All in all, it’s not an airport that I would go out of my way to visit again, but it was a pretty decent airport for a moderate layover.
