Buffalo Niagra International Airport

BUFFALO NI AGARA INTERNAT IONAL A I RPORT “With the events of September 11th happening and creating the TSA, we needed a significant expansion to our security checkpoint,” Vanecek continues. “Passengers could go through the security checkpoint, but visitors would have to meet them outside. They couldn’t go to the gate and meet them like they used to. This ate up a lot of space in our terminal. With the success of Southwest, Jet Blue, and the other carriers, our passenger traffic skyrocketed from three million to five million in a very short time. We quickly found that many areas were getting congested. When we started planning how we could do a better job of serving our passengers, we saw that we needed to relieve the congestion around the security checkpoint, as well as expand our baggage claim area.” “Our Airport is designed sort of like an airplane,” explains Vanecek. “We have a main center that is the fuselage, and the terminal itself is very linear, like the wings of an aircraft going through the fuselage from east to west. Everybody that comes through our security checkpoint today goes These airlines pressed for more gates, but the Airport had already overextended itself by adding north, east, and west wings to its administration building. In 1968, the NFTA initiated a study to ascertain the Buffalo area’s future airport service needs. Air travel projections pointed toward the construction of a new regional airport, which came to fruition in the early ‘90s. “Existing at the time were two terminals, East and West,” says Vanecek. “The NFTA decided they needed to be combined and they embarked on building a new terminal.” In September 1996, the NFTA changed the Airport’s name from Buffalo Municipal, effective with the opening of the new passenger terminal. The 15-gate, $56 million terminal opened to much fanfare on November 3, 1997. It had been designed by New York-based architects Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates to resemble a crystalline aircraft imbued with local Frank Lloyd Wright-ian flavor. “But it became very apparent that some improvements to that terminal were needed, so we signed on for an expansion project to address some of its shortcomings,” Vanecek says.