Airport #95/100: Miami

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Photo of "Miami International Airport" sign on terminal building

Miami International Airport
Miami, Florida, United States
First visit: 18 October 2019
flighthistorian.com/airports/MIA

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.

Photo of MIA Concourse E, with the satellite on the right and the pier on the left.
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.

Photo of the MIA central terminal from a parking structure

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.

Terminal Silhouettes: MCI

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Terminal silhouette of MCI (Kansas City)

MCI.svg

Kansas City was a fun airport to draw.

Although Kansas City’s terminals look circular, they don’t truly have curved walls. Instead, their true shape is a 54-sided regular polygon (a pentacontakaitetragon), with a portion removed to allow the roadway to enter.

Both the outside and inside wall are polygons, but they’re also rotated slightly from each other, such that each corner of the interior wall is lined up with the midpoint of each outer wall segment, and vice versa. Each inner wall corner has a notch (from the sun shade over the entry doors), and each outer wall corner has a spike (from the support pillars).

Zoomed in view of MCI terminal, showing roof beams, notches, and spikes
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Airport #92/100: Kansas City (MCI)

Paul Bogard1 Comment

Kansas City International Airport
Kansas City, Missouri, United States
First visit: 29 July 2019
flighthistorian.com/airports/MCI

I have a love–hate relationship with Kansas City International (KCI): it’s a beautiful terminal concept that absolutely doesn’t work as a modern airport.

KCI was designed to minimize walking from one’s parked car to the gate, and so each of the three terminals is a thin circle wrapped around a parking garage.

Satellite imagery of all three terminals
Interior of Terminal C
Interior of Terminal C. The entire interior width of the terminal, as can be seen here, is only about 50 feet (15.5 meters).

However, this design was built before airport security was required, and the terminals weren’t wide enough to have singular landside and airside areas separated by a security checkpoint. Thus, the terminals had to have multiple security checkpoints, with only a few gates behind each, in order to make security fit.

Landside interior of Terminal C
Landside (non-secure) area of Terminal C. An airside (secure) portion is behind the glass panels in the center of the photo.

Given those limitations, the airside seating areas past security are exceptionally crowded and have very limited amenities. My particular gate area had rows of seats that were crowded so close together that two people couldn’t sit across from each other without interweaving their knees, and yet there still weren’t enough seats for everyone to sit down.

Effectively, KCI is a pretty unique airport design, which I appreciate – but I also have no desire to ever fly out of it again until its upcoming new, modern terminal is open.

Terminal Silhouettes: BHM

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Terminal silhouette of BHM (Birmingham)

BHM.svg

I’m a fan of the circular landside portion of the terminal on this one, though I was hoping that the airside portion would turn out to be a symmetrical W shape, rather than the slightly irregular W that it turned out to be.

It was pretty easy to draw; the only curves could be drawn with a circle cut out of another circle, and everything else was straight lines save for the tiny circular bump in the middle of the airside concourse.