As I was sitting in a plane for twenty minutes, taxiing from one end of this monstrosity to the other, I thought of this community! Inside the airport is even worse. It’s just this GIANT, sprawling mall+airport thing, with flat parking deserts in between terminals that are so far apart you have to take a monorail to them. Absolutely wild.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Fort_Worth_International_Airport
While I agree with all of that, if you’re local, you can get dropped off basically at your gate.
This was modeled after the Airport of Tomorrow in Kansas City, which was heavily influenced by TWA who demanded “drive to your gate”, which was in itself heavily influenced by what TWA did at JFK with Eero Saarinen.
That was basically doomed from the start as planes got bigger. And the nail in the coffin was security added later on and basically trapping you in a tiny, crummy gate area at MCI (can you imagine no security at all??) and finally destroyed by the post 2001 security enhancements that made it even worse.
They’ve recently opened a new MCI terminal that replaces the airport of tomorrow and looks like an airport of today.
That is some impressive airport knowledge
No question, I’m a plane nerd.
That’s really interesting! Thanks for the context.
You do realize that DFW has nearly 2000 flights every day, and 200,000 customers, every single day, right?
You need 6 terminals at that point. The rest of that is just infrastructure, taxiways, and runways. And the runways are spaced at the minimum distance apart for FAA rules.
It’s a masterpiece of design, just from how big and complex it is.
Six terminals, definitely. That far apart? IDK about that. SeaTac serves 125kish passengers per day and while you do need to board a little train thing between a couple of the stations, the rest of the terminals are walkable. (And the little train thing between terminals at SeaTac is a hop skip and a jump vs the DFW monorail.) DFW feels like they had the space so they just built it as big as they wanted. It reminds me of when I create giant mansions for my Sims only to realize it takes then an in-game hour to go check their mail. At some point it’s just no longer efficient.
To be clear, we flew through here and I am very grateful this airport exists! They got us home safe.
Really don’t get why its posted here? Like, why is this dystopian?
I read what you said and I still don’t understand.
Trains are better.
The feeling of giant emptiness, geared to suit the needs of capitalism… It’s hard to explain. We walked about fifteen minutes, with multiple moving walkways, to get to customs, within the terminal where we landed. After that, we walked I-can’t-even-remember how far to security, where the line never stopped moving (they are seriously on point in this airport), then had to get on a monorail and go through several stations before getting to our departure terminal. (Then had to do the monorail again when our gate changed.) Airports are always massive, but this one was a league of its own. And I do get that it’s a huge international hub, and obviously we needed to use it. It exists for a reason. It just felt extremely dystopian in person. The scale, the emptiness, the existence in a deserted landscape with these weird hotel towers just kind of off in the distance, with flat land as far as the eye can see and flat parking lots full of cars, while you whiz past on a poorly a/ced monorail. Hopefully that helps. ☺️
While I personally wouldn’t get these feelings, I do appreciate your explanation of how you felt, and the difference in perspective.
@jennwiththesea on the flip side, flying out of Love Field (15 miles from DFW) is really good for what it is! everything is super straightforward from the moment you arrive and the interior is super clean and inviting. the only caveat is that only three major airlines fly there (southwest, alaska, and very limited delta service).
DFW is larger than the island of Manhattan.
TBF Manhattan is only 22 square miles
