Los Angeles airport commissioners signed off on a $961 million contract to design and build an 11-gate, mid-airfield concourse at Los Angeles International Airport, officials announced Friday.
The Los Angeles Airport Commission on Thursday awarded the job of designing and building the $1.25 billion Midfield Satellite Concourse North project to the joint venture Turner-PCL, which has chosen architecture firms Corgan Asociates and Gensler to help design the project.
The seven-year contract is split into a design and a construction phase.
The planned 800,000-square-feet, five-story concourse will be 1,300 feet west of the Tom Bradley International Terminal. Its 11 gates will be capable of serving high-capacity jumbo planes such as Airbus A380 and Boeing 747-8i, under the current plans.
The design and pre-construction of the project is expected to be finished in late 2016, and construction is expected to take another three years and could be competed by 2020.
The awarding of the contract comes as sales of the A380 has slowed, with no orders from passenger airlines so far this year, though the company is still fulfilling orders made in the previous years. One Airbus executive said earlier this month that the company is considering making improvements to the model or discontinuing production of the airplane.
Officials of Los Angeles World Airport, which operates the city-owned LAX, said Airbus has assured them the goal is still to keep producing the A380, possibly with improvements such as more fuel efficient engines or coming out with “stretch” capacity versions that can seat even more than the current 850- capacity A380 model.
LAWA spokeswoman Nancy Castles said despite uncertainty around the production of A380s, “we do not see any impact to our on-going multi-billion- dollar LAX Modernization Program, because our efforts are aimed at improving the passenger experience overall at all our terminals.”
“Airlines also have terminal renovation programs valued at hundreds of millions of dollars underway to improve their terminals and these do not include building A380 gates,” she said.
Castles said existing new gates at the Tom Bradley International Terminal regularly serve 20 different types of planes, not just “new- generation” aircrafts such as the A380, the Boeing 747-8 and the Boeing 777- ER.
