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Leonardo Times JUNE 2014

“We vlogen met een zucht...”

R

ight from the initial planning phase until decades after it’s opening, the air-port made headlines with cost overruns, technical failures, provocative art displays and even doomsday conspiracies. What caused all the construction problems and how did it turn into a source of inspiration for conspiracy theorists? As one could ex-pect, the issues are not completely unre-lated from each other.

THE POWER OF AIRLINES

Denver International Airport was opened in 1995 after years of delays to replace the ageing Stapleton Airport that had been serving the Denver metropolitan area in Colorado, USA since 1932. Stapleton Airport suffered from typical old airport issues: it had an inconvenient runway layout, there was no more room for ex-pansion and it received many complaints about noise from local residents. Fore-casts for the air traffic demand in Denver predicted that a major capacity increase would be needed in order to meet future demands, and to achieve this it was de-cided to build a completely new airport, far outside the city limits on a land site twice the size of Manhattan. However, it

quickly turned out that the used forecasts were overly optimistic, and actually, the demand for flights went down after the construction of the new airport had com-menced. How did this happen?

At a major airport like Denver, demand is heavily dictated by the presence of major hub carriers. Stapleton was a hub for three carriers: Frontier, Continental and United. Frontier went bankrupt in 1986 and was taken over by Continental. Continental and United were not convinced at all by the new airport plans, but because it was vital to get these airlines on board to be hub carriers for the new international airport, both airlines had the power to demand very ambitious design changes before they would agree with the con-struction plans. Continental demanded that a two-level bridge, which would span dual taxiways, would be built to connect the main terminal with the Continental concourse, in addition to the planned tunnel system. Also, it was requested that a maintenance hangar and flight kitchen would be built and paid for by the airport. United demanded the same facilities, as well as that the bridge which connected

to the Continental concourse would be covered with opaque glass, such that pas-sengers on their way to the United con-course would not be able to see the Con-tinental aircraft looking shiny in the bright Colorado sun.

All these requirements drove up the con-struction costs beyond limits, especially since the cost estimations were kept de-liberately low for political reasons. Within a year after Continental signed a lease, it went into ‘Chapter 11’ bankruptcy, which allowed the airline to walk away from the signed contracts. In 1994, Continental de-cided not to operate from Denver at all. Thus, United remained as the only carrier to operate a hub at the new airport. Fun-nily enough, Continental and United were merged in 2010 as a result of yet another bankruptcy!

THE BAGGAGE SYSTEM FROM HELL!

United also demanded a baggage han-dling system with extremely ambitious specifications, and it demanded that the airport would only be opened once the baggage handling system functioned as specified. United only requested to have

The story behind the world’s possibly most controversial airport

Big airport projects have often been prone to controversy. Schiphol’s Polderbaan

project, Heathrow’s expansion, and the construction of Berlin’s new airport all

suffered from political, financial or technical issues. However, Denver International

Airport (often referred to as DIA) caused uproar in so many ways that it easily tops

any other major airport project in history.

TEXT Joris Stolwijk, Editor Leonardo Times, BSc student Aerospace Engineering

DENVER’S AIRPORT OF DOOM

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JUNE 2014 Leonardo Times

39

this system implemented for its own con-course, but the Denver city government decided to build it for the entire airport. This made it a project of size and complex-ity never seen before, and there was not a single company that off ered a design proposal, which would meet the require-ments. Finally, BAE was given a practically blank check and unrestricted access to the building site to realize this system. However, the originally planned $183 mil-lion construction costs grew by $1 milmil-lion per day, and even after years of delays, the system never really worked. During a demonstration on national TV, the system failed dramatically, literally eating bag-gage and throwing it around. Only United decided to use the system for outgoing fl ights, and in 2010, the system was com-pletely removed, saving United $1 million per month on maintenance and repairs of the system.

CONTROVERSIAL ART AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES

While cost overruns, delays and technical problems are not that uncommon, what really makes this airport stand out is the bizarre, sometimes daunting art displays that are spread around the terminal. The fi rst thing that greets you when driving towards the terminal entrance is a sculp-ture of a giant blue mustang with red glowing eyes (See Figure 1). This sculpture has its own scary story: the artist who cre-ated it, died because the horse structure fell on top of him when a cable snapped. It had to be completed by his family. After driving past the horse, the main Jeppe-sen terminal building catches the eye with its circus tent-like rooftop structure (See Visual), resembling the white caps of the Rocky Mountains nearby. Inside this terminal building, several mural paint-ings can be found, each depicting rather disturbing scenes. For instance, there is one mural where a giant military fi gure wearing a gas mask is shown, holding a machine gun and a sword, with scared children around him who are suff ering in darkness (Figure 2). Another mural shows three dead women in a coffi n, each of dif-ferent ethnicity and with a burning city in the background. According to the artist, the whole collection of murals represents a story where man-made environmental destruction and genocide is eventually turned into a world coming together in harmony and peace. Conspiracy theorists think otherwise, saying that the murals show signs of an upcoming New World Or-der, where one large government formed by the world’s elite rules the world, after the world population has been reduced to two billion. They believe that the airport was merely built as a cover-up for an un-derground secret military base, with many facilities to even run an underground city. In these underground bunkers, chosen

ci-vilians and the world elite can seek cover from an inevitable massive doomsday scenario. According to the conspiracy theorists, it is also not a coincidence that the runway layout resembles a swastika-like shape, and even the failing baggage system was simply a cover-up so that the tunnel systems can be used for other evil purposes. Absurd ideas can be found ev-erywhere on the internet about what is hiding deep underneath the airport build-ings, and as far-fetched as they seem, they do provide some food for thought.

A DECENT AIRPORT IN THE END

In the end though, for the average travel-ler, Denver International is just an airport like any other. And right now the airport functions perfectly fi ne, with a manually operated baggage system, and being a hub for United as well as a newly formed Frontier Airlines. Between 2005 and 2010,

readers of Business Traveller Magazine awarded “Best Airport in North America” to the airport for fi ve years in a row. One might wander by a mural and wonder why on earth these scenes are shown at an airport – as if fl ying isn’t already scary enough –, but most will not really care as long as they don’t miss their connecting fl ights.

References

[1] Flyvbjerg, B. Buzelius, N. Rothengat-ter, W. (2003). Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

[2] “Five Years in a Row”. Wingtips (City & County of Denver Department of Avia-tion) 1 (10). January 2010. Retrieved July 11, 2012.

[3] Jacang Maher, Jared (August 30, 2007). “DIA Conspiracies Take Off ”. Den-ver Westword. Retrieved July 11, 2012 Figure 1. The horse statue at the airport entrance

Figure 2. One of the murals found in the terminal building.

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