Airport #96/100: Wilmington, NC (ILM)
Wilmington International Airport
Wilmington, North Carolina, United States
First visit: 30 December 2019
flighthistorian.com/airports/ILM
Terminal Silhouettes: Updated ATL
ATL has undergone some minor construction since I drew my original ATL silhouette in 2015.
I took the opportunity to redraw ATL, since there were a lot of details I was unhappy with on the original drawing. There were a lot of mistakes I’d made in the drawing due to lack of experience, and I never did like having all the emergency exit stairs cluttering the silhouette. The result is a much cleaner silhouette.
Bonus Silhouette: OCCC
While it’s not an airport, the Orange County Convention Center campus in Orlando, Florida is a similarly sprawling complex.
How sprawling? Well, it’s bigger than LAX!
Terminal Silhouettes: HEL
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.
Terminal Silhouettes: FAY
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.
Between that, the outdated imagery, and photos I could find of the project, I was able to piece together enough information to properly draw the terminal.
Terminal Silhouettes: FLL
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.
