$200 million terminal set to open at McCarran

Monday, May 18, 1998 | 3:04 a.m.

"Everything is completely different in the D Gate," airport spokesman Adam Mayberry said during a recent tour.

Different, that is, from the other three blandly decorated wings of the nation's 10th busiest airport. Instead of maroon carpeting, there is light blue. Rather than nondescript corridors and outside views of docked planes, there is a huge rotunda and a window wall that offers crisp mountain vistas. Whereas 3-foot-wide moving walkways are the norm elsewhere, Terminal D uses 4-foot-wide walkways so "so you'll really be able to pass the people standing to the right," Mayberry notes.

The terminal is scheduled to receive and send off its first flights on June 16, following a four-day public unveiling.

The facility provides airlines with 26 new gates and will give the airport the capacity to receive about 15 million more travelers per year than the current 30 million total. United Airlines, Delta, Northwest, TWA and American all will use the gates and will free space in Terminal C for Southwest Airlines to expand operations.

The terminal connects to the main airport via a 90-second tram ride that runs in part beneath Paradise Road. Once passengers arrive, they will walk into the rotunda and head upstairs to two branches with about 15 gates each. Each concession area has a different Nevada-related theme and physical motif - from alien affectations for Area 51 to a rustic cowboy scene for an old-West section.

When it's complete, Terminal D will be the kind of a place Hollywood directors could adore. Many features evoke film imagery, from the stairs of the rotunda reminiscent of the famed "Untouchables" scene at Union Station in Chicago where gunfire flies as a baby carriage limps down a stairwell. Also, a glass wall overlooks the runway that seems ripe for a jet-nosed shattering akin to an apocalyptic moment in "Airplane!"

The glamorous look is intentional, said project designer Windom Kimsey with Tate & Snyder Architects.

"We wanted it real light and open, a grand space that celebrates arrivals," Kimsey said. "The big escalator thing was designed with the intent of looking like one of the old central train stations, like Grand Central Station in New York. There should be a sense of scale, of grandeur about arriving in Las Vegas."

Departing passengers pay for that grandeur. A $3 surcharge on all tickets is funding the airport project, Mayberry said, including the $200 million terminal expansion, the $80 million for the tram, $48 million for computer systems upgrades and $18.6 million for four more baggage carousels. All told, the project will cost nearly $350 million.