There was a big dog-and-pony show at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport last week touting American’s growth. This didn’t sound like much to me until I saw the details. Holy cow. American is turning on the jets with a massive number of new gates at DFW in the not-so-distant future.
You may recall the previous DFW growth plan which was announced in 2023. Terminals A and C would each get new stubby piers which would add 5 and 4 net new gates respectively. Those were dedicated to American. Then there was the new 15-gate Terminal F which was going to be built as cheaply and annoyingly as possible.
Terminal F v1.0 would have no headhouse (ticketing/baggage claim) and no parking. It was just a rectangle built at the edge of the current footprint. This was rumored to be for Southwest, Frontier, and some of the cats and dogs in Terminal E today, presumably opening a little more space for American somewhere in E.
Here is how I expected it would look back then:
But now, it’s a whole new ballgame. American will still get those 9 gates in Terminals A and C, but Terminal F has been put on steroids with a total of 31 gates coming online. And all of those will go to American.
Here’s how I think the new design will look:
As you can see, this now creates a real headhouse which will have ticketing and baggage functions. It will be connected to Terminal D via a walkway, and it will have international-capable gates, expanding the airport’s customs/immigration processing capability.
The Skylink station will be on the hypotenuse of that left corner triangle which creates easy access into the gates for connections from other terminals. It may look like the track disappears in that image, but the Skylink actually runs on top of part of the new addition and airplanes will taxi under it at some point. Here’s a rendering from American Airlines and DFW:
It looks to me like the existing gates D1/2/3/4 will now just flow right into the new terminal. That’s great news for locals who get stuck flying out of those gates today, because it is one long walk from the rest of the D gates.
As you can tell, this design will be very different than the rest of the airport. It’s half a normal semi-circle, but it has gates on both sides instead of a roadway and parking as in the other terminals so it is a far more efficient use of space. This allows American to put a lot more gates in a smaller footprint — it will have the same number of gates as A does after that 5-gate addition is built — but the design does create other issues. Most importantly: how do you even get there if you’re not connecting?
This is where that new rectangular parking garage comes into play. Right now, that area is just an empty field, but you can see in that rendering that it will become a large parking structure. According to the release, this garage will have a “built-in curbside circulation and an innovative baggage drop and check-in area to maintain the quick access to check in and security that customers have come to expect.”
American clarified that this will be where people get dropped off since F v2.0 won’t have the big curbside of the other terminals, but then people will walk across the footbridge and into the terminal where baggage and ticketing will be.
This doesn’t come cheap. The original Terminal F build was supposed to come in at $1.63 billion. It’s now going to be about $4 billion with this added scope.
Is it worth it? Of course it is. DFW is American’s bread-and-butter. It has an enormous, profitable hub there which it wants to keep growing. By the time this is done, Delta’s Atlanta hub might look tiny. I never thought we’d see the day.
Put it this way. As of now according to Cirium data, DFW is scheduled to have 919 departures per day on average in July. Delta in Atlanta? It has 902 daily scheduled. Now, Delta does have much bigger airplanes flying — it averages 160 seats per departure in Atlanta while American has 136 — but just think about how many more departures American can run through DFW with all those new gates. It is going to be the biggest single airline hub in the world.
The key question for me now is exactly how many new gates American will get. We know for sure that American gets the 9 new gates in A and C as a net increase with no loss elsewhere. But if American is getting the full 31 gates in F, it is going to have to give back something. A DFW spokesperson told me “…DFW airport will receive back gates currently operated by American Airlines to be used in the future for other airlines.”
I couldn’t get any more detail on that, but the obvious assumption is that it will give some at least some of the gates it has in E today and presumably some space in D as well since it can do international flying at F. But how many gates will go back? We don’t know. What is clear is that it will be a big net gain, and I’d be surprised if it was anything less than a couple dozen net new gates in the end. The first ones start coming online in 2027, so get ready for growth.
