And now for the next installment of my look at former hubs around the country, I’m combining two into one today. In a sense, they are similar, but in another, they are complete opposites. I’m talking about the main airports for two cities connected by I-70, only about a 3-hour drive apart. That’s right, it’s Indianapolis and Columbus, two former, minor hubs that have built or are building new terminals 20 years apart.
Indianapolis was a small hub for USAir until the 1990s. When that ended, ATA built up a hub in its hometown. ATA killed its hub shortly before the airline died in the mid-2000s, and then Northwest had something of a focus city as part of its Heartland strategy for a time. It may not have grown to the heights of other Midwestern hubs, but it still had its zeniths and nadirs.
Traffic at IND peaked in 2005 with more than 180 daily departures and more than 6 million annual departing seats. They probably thought the sky was the limit. In fact, the airport’s gleaming new terminal opened in between the two primary runways way back in 2008, but this was right before the fall. By 2014, traffic was down to about 125 daily flights and just under 4.5 million departing seats. Here is IND in all its glory today:
That massive facility along the bottom of the image is FedEx’s hub facility. If you look closely, you can see the old terminal on the right side of the airport. The large concrete ramp still has the ghosts of the terminal and concourses shadowed. Only the parking garage still stands.
As someone who spent plenty of time visiting my soon-to-be in-laws flying through that old terminal, I can certainly attest that it desperately needed to be replaced. The concourses were awkward, small, and had independent security checkpoints which did not help traffic flow well. The new terminal was a huge improvement in every way but one. It added a whole lot of drive time to get to the airport.
I rotated this map a little so it would be easier to read, but that green dotted line that connects with the yellow one is following I-465. That segment of the road runs true north-south. I-465 is the beltway around the city that made it very easy to get into the old terminal. Now, it requires going on I-70 west for awhile before circling back on the airport access road around the end of the runways.
There are time savings in other ways, however. If the airport was departing from the southwest, it was one long taxi from the old terminal. It’s much easier now. Then again, it has increased the taxi time when the winds are blowing the other direction.
The reality is that there really wasn’t a better option unless they wanted to decommission the crosswind runway or pay a ton to tunnel the road under it, and what’s done is done. This is old news, but I bring it up to contrast it with what Columbus is facing as it works to build its new terminal right now.
Here is the current CMH:
The old Port Columbus — I loved that name, but it was changed to John Glenn Columbus International nearly a decade ago — lies to the northeast of downtown Columbus, the opposite of the situation in Indianapolis.
Port Columbus was the smallest hub for America West from 1992 until it started shrinking in 1999. This was another airport I knew well since I would shuttle back and forth to school in DC as an intern at America West in the 1990s. The hub was gone by 2003, but there really was no letup in demand as other airlines moved in. It actually saw its peak in 2007 with about 170 daily departures and annual departing seats topping 5 million for the only time until 2023. That year benefited from the short-lived introduction of Skybus using the ULCC model.
With traffic growing and the terminal rapidly aging, it was time for Columbus to do something. As in Indianapolis, the terminal sits toward one end of the airport, but unlike Indianapolis, it lies far away from the main airport entrance. So when it was time to create a new terminal? They looked at the easiest opportunity… the sea of parking lots in between.
The new plan is called CMH Next. It started with relocating the rental cars into a new structure outside the current parking garage. It ends in 2029 with a brand new terminal. Here is the plan:
The rental car center is already up and running, and if you’ve flown to CMH that probably annoys you. After all, it requires a shuttle from the current terminal. But it will be just a short walk from the new terminal, connected to the new parking garage as well.
The new terminal will actually have more gates than the current one, up to 36 from 29. The whole project is set to cost $2 billion while the terminal itself will be $1.6 billion. That’s a whole lot more bang for your buck than what Cleveland is getting with its $1.6 billion plan. As an added bonus, the terminal will be closer to the airport entrance off I-670.
Both Columbus and Indianapolis came to similar conclusions twenty years apart. The difference is that Columbus’s path of least resistance actually results in a better terminal placement whereas the opposite was true in Indy. For Columbus, that means there really weren’t any big trade-offs to consider. Now if only they’d change it back to Port Columbus….
