D gates swing open

Jeff Schweers

Friday, June 12, 1998 | 3:39 a.m.

Standing by the 45-foot-high panoramic window of the Great Hall in the new D gates terminal at McCarran International Airport, one gets a sense that this is a portal to the future of Las Vegas.

It also offers a view of the past, overlooking the tarmac that began its life 50 years ago as McCarran Field.

Back then the adobe hut next to a dirt strip that George Crockett maintained with a jury-rigged grader was an important link to the outside world, the lifeblood for a small but growing resort town surrounded by desert.

"When we started it was nothing but a dirt runway, which my husband drug with old railroad iron behind a truck," Crockett's widow, Peg, said. "We built a runway, started flight operations and grew like top seed."

The squat adobe terminal is long gone. Today a sweep-roofed, ultra-modern superstructure stands near one of two east-west runways as if poised for flight, so many evolutionary generations removed from the original terminal it may as well be a new species of airport.

But one thing remains the same -- the airport is integral to the vitality and continued economic growth of the booming community.

A lot of hopes are riding on the 26 gleaming gates opening Saturday in the $200 million terminal.

"It's really important because about 50 percent of the visitors who come to Las Vegas come through McCarran," Commissioner Mary Kincaid, one of the seven elected officials who oversee the airport, said. "Tourists are the lifeblood of the community, and they provide much of the funding for the entire state through the gaming taxes."

Kincaid, who moved to Las Vegas as a child in 1946, remembers when the airport's main terminal was the Hughes terminal on Las Vegas Boulevard South.

"To look at that and think that used to be McCarran not that many years ago, it's mind-boggling to see what it is today."

The resort industry is hoping to fill the new gates with 6 million additional passengers a year. That's what they say they need to fill the 20,000 additional hotel rooms coming on line in the next couple of years.

From widening Interstate 15 for those driving to Las Vegas to expanding McCarran and building more convention and meeting space, infrastructure is paramount, Rob Powers, a spokesman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said.

"The bar has been set very high," Powers said. "It's important to keep it high when money is borrowed usually a few years ahead of actual construction."

But new gates in and of themselves won't attract more flights or more tourists, Powers said. That's where the LVCVA comes in. The agency has launched an aggressive marketing campaign to increase demand for Las Vegas.

"When the demand for Las Vegas is there, the airlines will figure out a way to fly people in and make money," Powers said.

With passenger volume down half a percent from 1996 to 1997 and continuing to decline in 1998, there have been some second thoughts about whether all those new gates are needed right now.

But Aviation Director Randy Walker said the timing of the opening was critical to providing the same level of customer service and to give the airlines some much-needed elbow room.

"We are constrained right now capacity-wise," Walker said. "We have airlines that would like more gates for their current operations, and we haven't been able to give them because we don't have them."

McCarran, the ninth busiest airport in the nation, also handled more passengers per gate in 1996 than any other U.S. airport, Walker said.

"That really crowds you," he said. "More people in more parts of the airport means we're operating less efficiently."

The new gates will increase passenger capacity to 45 million a year. And when needed, the airport can build up to 22 new gates to bring passenger capacity up to 60 million a year.

"We don't ever want to be the bottleneck," Walker said. "We haven't been so far and don't plan on being it in the future, so we needed to get our facilities in place."

Air travel has played a role in getting people to Las Vegas since 1926, Mark Hall-Patton, administrator for the McCarran Aviation Heritage Museum, said.

"People flying in on their own airplanes had a good deal to do with the influx of people to the Strip hotels," Peg Crockett said.

As rail and bus travel dwindled, the airlines and the valley grew. The airport's growth is one part of the local infrastructure that has kept ahead of the curve, Hall-Patton said.

Over time the original terminal was moved east, expanded and modernized.

As the town evolved, so did the airport's architecture. The small adobe-style terminal built in 1948 reflected the fact that people tended to see themselves in terms of the Old West, Hall-Patton said. When the new clam-shell terminal was built in 1963, it reflected the jet-set age that had descended on the Strip in the persona of Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack pals.

The new terminal, with its sweeping arch and other architectural features evoking flight, poises the community for the 21st century, Hall-Patton said.

"Again we've made another step forward," Hall-Patton said. For years to come, "this is going to be the structure that sets the tone for the airport."

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