Washington National airport built an entire new concourse to replace one miserable gate. Gate 35X was a bus gate that served 14 remote stands for 50 seat regional jets. The new concourse, in contrast, supports 14 large regional jets.

Just after the opening of this new concourse for American Airlines flights, which will also feature an Admirals Club, American Airlines shared some construction updates with employees as part of a question and answer session on earnings call day last week.

• The old gate 35X sign, which Doug Parker says is something that “looks like a gate but says ‘go down these steps and get on a bus and we’ll drive you out to an airplane'” is now sitting in American’s government affairs office.

  Nate Gatten, American’s Senior Vice President of Government Affairs, reports that “someone on [his] team was supposed to drive over and pick it up.” It was being held in the Piedmont office at the airport but has since been collected. He joked that it would eventually “go to the C.R. Smith Museum.”

  Parker reports that he “heard about [the gate] a lot” in the form of complaints from Congressmen who live in small communities and were stuck using that gate all the time.

  

• Construction to renovate American’s New York JFK Terminal 8 got underway just before the start of the pandemic. It will culminate in moving British Airways over from terminal 7 and mean the addition of hard stands and stinger gates. This project is not on hold, and will will continue for a couple of years.

  The total number of gates in the terminal will actually decrease when this work is completed, but it will accommodate more widebodies. There will be shared premium lounge facilities for American and British Airways passengers. And there will be a dedicated premium passenger path from check-in and through security directly to the lounge.

  

• American Airlines is getting 9 new gates across the A and C terminals at Dallas – Fort Worth. This was new to me, though new terminal F and the renovation of terminal C are on hold despite Dallas Fort-Worth already being scheduled this summer at 90% of pre-pandemic capacity.

  

You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, so the best we can say about American’s Gate 35X is that it brought together the likes of Robert Mueller and Donald Trump, Jr. and no matter how powerful the politician they were all brought back down to earth by 35X.

Here’s a haiku about Washington National’s gate 35X though I would remove the second ‘very’ from the second line in order to give it seven syllables.

I’m so bored that I wrote a haiku about National Airport.
It’s my first poem in 42 years, so please, be kind:

Gate 35-X
I hate it so very much
Crowded. Awful. Sad.

— Steven Bennett (@steven_bennett2) January 8, 2018