Charlotte-Douglas airport: gleaming, growing and way too crowded | Opinion

Charlotte Douglas International Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world. It’s handling a higher volume of passengers than ever before — a record 53.4 million in 2023 — and American Airlines is one of the city’s largest employers.

But as many Charlotte residents know — and love to complain about — it can also be a pain. More recently, travelers have taken to social media to lament longer-than-usual security lines and cramped, busy terminals.

“Total f**king chaos at @CLTAirport,” one user wrote on X. “This is embarrassing.”

Some of that is to be expected, especially in an airport as busy as Charlotte Douglas. But Charlotte’s airport also feels uniquely frustrating. Parts of the airport, like baggage claim, just feel sort of shabby. Others, like the amount of congestion on the roadways, are just plain irritating. In a lot of ways, it feels like what LaGuardia used to be before an overhaul in recent years — dated, inefficient and just far too small for the amount of travelers it hosts on a daily basis.

That’s not exactly anyone’s fault. When the airport opened many decades ago, it’s hard to imagine anyone expected the level of volume that exists today. Like the city itself, it seems to be growing much faster than existing infrastructure can reasonably accommodate.

For one, the total number of gates at Charlotte Douglas seems somewhat low compared to other airports that manage a similar volume of passengers. Miami International Airport, which moved about 52.3 million passengers in 2023, has 131 gates. San Francisco International Airport moved about 50 million passengers in 2023 and has 120 gates. Compare that to Charlotte, which served more than 53 million passengers across 115 gates.

And if the airport feels exceptionally busy, it’s because it is. When measured by aircraft movements (arrivals and departures), Charlotte Douglas is the seventh busiest airport in the entire world. That puts it on par with much larger airports, like LAX and JFK.

Traffic is also a problem. Last Thanksgiving, that problem was particularly acute, with some saying it took them a whole hour to drive just one mile to the terminal’s front doors. It’s clear that the arrivals and departures area was never intended to handle such a high volume of traffic — it’s oddly shaped and simply too small to allow hundreds of passengers to easily come and go at any given moment. At the moment, there’s no magic fix in store for that problem.

All of this is despite the significant construction that Charlotte Douglas has undergone in recent years. LaGuardia’s main terminals underwent a complete renovation that transformed them from something that President Joe Biden once called “third world” to one of the country’s best airports. The $8 billion project took about six years to complete.

Such a radical (and speedy) transformation does not seem to be on the horizon for Charlotte Douglas, even if potential improvements are on the way. People like to joke about the never-ending construction at the airport, but it’s mostly funny because it’s true. Construction on Destination CLT, the master plan that began approximately a decade ago and will continue through at least the next couple of years.

There’s been a lot of change so far: a new area between Concourses D and E called The Plaza, concourse expansions and an elevated roadway. More change is in the works, like the completion of the ongoing terminal lobby expansion and the Concourse A expansion that will include 10 new gates, the first significant gate addition in many years. In the meantime, though, the construction only makes the airport more frustrating — it’s made traffic worse and security lines longer.

But as the airport continues to break records for passenger traffic, it doesn’t feel like construction will ever be able to keep up with demand. The airport has said it expects to surpass 60 million passengers in 2024, which would exceed the record set just last year by 13%. Perhaps the airport ought to be as attentive to people using the airport as it is to growing the airport. It’s the story of Charlotte, in a way, and when you do too much of the latter, the former suffer.