Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2003 | 11:05 a.m.
As a hot and dusty town in the desert, hundreds of miles from any major city, post-World War II Las Vegas faced a real possibility of disappearing from the map if it could not drum up business.
"Las Vegas could have dried up and blown away," said Mark Hall-Patton, the administrator of the Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum at McCarran International Airport and an authority on Southern Nevada aviation.
"There was nothing here -- the Hoover Dam was built, the Army Air Corps Flexible Gunnery School was being phased out -- they had to do something. Tourism and flights to get people here were the answers."
Throughout its modern history, from the need to fly in tourists to its association with billionaire aviator Howard Hughes, Las Vegas has been tied to the airplane. The city itself will turn 100 a little more than a year after Wednesday's 100th anniversary of human flight.
Hall-Patton, who has written several papers and produced documentaries on local aviation history, said in addition to the post-war era, aviation in Las Vegas has faced two other crucial periods:
And today, unrestrained growth is pushing McCarran, the centerpiece of aviation in Las Vegas, toward exceeding its capacity within the next 10 years. That creates the need for a second major Southern Nevada airport, expected to be eventually be built in the Ivanpah area, a dry lake bed 30 miles south of Las Vegas.
Hall-Patton said for most of McCarran's history -- which began in 1948 with 35,000 passengers a year and now has more than 35 million users annually -- growth in the community and at the airport trudged along hand-in-hand.
"One factor did not drive the other," he said. "Without the growth of the airport the town never would have become what it is today and without the town pushing for growth, the airport never would have grown to what it is now.
"However today the airport definitely grows in response to the town's growth because growth is going to happen anyway. The vision for the airport today is very clear -- do what it must to meet growth. Failure is not an option."
Randy Walker, Clark County Aviation director since 1990, couldn't agree more.
"We believe McCarran will reach capacity by 2013 when 52 million people pass through the airport a year," Walker said. "I constantly tell my staff we cannot become the impediment to that growth."
Even the best prognosticators years ago could not foresee what would happen in the most recent years in Las Vegas.
A 1992 Federal Aviation Administration study predicted that by 2005 McCarran International Airport would be the 11th-busiest airport in the country and that 19.8 million passengers a year would board planes at the facility.
Instead, McCarran already is the nation's seventh-busiest airport and, officials say, if it had not been for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the passenger totals predicted by the FAA likely would have been met last year, as a record of 36.9 million people flew in and out of the facility in 2000.
"They (FAA) based their predictions on global and historic trends that just don't apply to the growth we experience in Las Vegas," Walker said.
"They could not predict the numbers of hotel rooms that would be built and the impact tourism would have on this area. You don't normally see these numbers of air travelers in a community that has less than two million residents."
Today 80 percent of McCarran's business is tourism- and convention-related.
As Las Vegas continues to grapple with meeting growth-generated needs, officials of the county-owned airport say it is imperative they come as close as possible to accurately projecting growth.
The county-owned airport's formula, Walker said, is not complicated.
Each new hotel room, he said, represents 320 new airline passengers per year. With 10,000 hotel rooms under construction in a community that already has 127,000 such rooms, the airport will have an additional 3.2 million passengers a year when those rooms come on line.
But keeping up with such growth remains a constant challenge, Walker said.
"Because we are government, we cannot move as fast in response to the private sector's plans for hotel room expansion," he said. "It generally takes a resort two years to add planned rooms, while it takes us four years to build the gates to meet those needs."
Walker said the airport has managed to get by because gate capacity can temporarily be expanded to meet needs.
McCarran, which has 92 gates and expects to open three more by September, figures to accommodate 420,000 passengers per gate. But during growth spurts it has accommodated 460,000 passengers per gate, Walker said.
"That elasticity has gotten us through painful periods," he said.
But painful periods are nothing knew to local aviation history.
Hall-Patton said that people today are still confused that the McCarran Field of the 1930s and 1940s is not the McCarran Airport they know today. In fact, the first McCarran Field today is the site of Nellis Air Force Base.
"After World War II, the Army-Air Corps facility was closing, but local government officials wanted it to stay open and grow," Hall-Patton said, noting that the facility in Northeast Las Vegas was leased to the military.
At that time, all commercial aviation was moved to the old Alamo Airport on the south end of the Strip. After McCarran Field became Las Vegas Army Air Field, the Alamo site was renamed to honor U.S. Sen. Patrick McCarran, D-Nev., a champion of aviation.
Because gambling was legalized in 1931, it was decided that tourism would be the key to attract people. And, with the Interstate highway system years away from being developed, flight seemed to be the ticket to bring tourists here.
"The Live Wire Fund was established by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce in 1945 to collect money from local businesses to advertise Southern Nevada as a destination," Hall-Patton said, referring to the days before the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority came into existence.
"We spent more money per capita on advertising Las Vegas at that time than any other community in the United States spent advertising itself."
But what really boosted growth of both the town and the airport was a yearning by people to burst out of a prolonged period of the doldrums, Hall-Patton said.
"The country was coming out of 15 years of the depression and war, and people had a great deal of pent-up energy," Hall-Patton said. "They wanted to get out and do something -- travel, see what America had to offer.
"Also, labor laws had been passed that included employees receiving paid vacations. So, not only did people have the desire to travel they had some money and the time to do it."
Local officials tapped into that desire in newspaper ads and airline brochures that painted Las Vegas as an adult oasis -- sun and fun, swimming pools and resorts -- and a fantasy derived from the popularity of Western films.
"They promoted Las Vegas as an Old West town," Hall-Patton said. "Las Vegas didn't exist in the 19th century with gunslingers in the streets. But with events such as Helldorado that image was created and it drew visitors."
Also, Hall-Patton said, while early airline travel was expensive, it was an effective means of getting people to a far-away destination rather quickly. And it did not cost the airlines much to operate, he said.
"A DC-3 had 21 seats, but the airlines needed to fill just 10 of them per flight to make money," Hall-Patton said.
He said that made it possible for Bonanza Airline to become Nevada's first interstate airline in 1949, just four years after it was established locally as a charter service.
Although the DC-3 offered an uncomfortable, bumpy ride, earning it the not-so-endearing nickname of the "vomit comet," it had a safe flying record, making it a popular choice of air travelers for many years.
"Throughout the 1950s, as the Strip grew, it had a symbiotic relationship with the airport, which also was independently growing," Hall-Patton said.
By the mid-1950s, airport officials started looking at long-range plans to meet growth needs that included moving the airport and its terminal from Las Vegas Boulevard South to its present site off Paradise Road, Hall-Patton said, noting that another growth pain was to be experienced because of that.
"There was opposition from the Strip hotels at that time because the owners feared that Paradise Road would be used to bypass their hotels and instead take people to Fremont Street," Hall-Patton said.
A deal that won the Strip hotels' support was for visitors to be transported from the relocated airport down Bond Road -- which today is Tropicana Avenue -- to the Strip. That paved the way for moving the airport terminal to its current site, where it opened in 1963, Hall-Patton said.
"That compromise had to be reached because by 1960, 1 million people a year were going through the airport," Hall-Patton said. "Otherwise, the airport would have been stuck with a little terminal that would not have met the needs for future growth."
In the 1970s, Sen. Howard Cannon, D-Nev., was able to push though Congress his airline deregulation bill. That meant airlines no longer had to get the federal government's permission to fly to destinations, but instead dealt with the airports to establish additional routes.
"Just after deregulation, the number of airlines serving McCarran doubled from seven to 14 and, as far as growth is concerned, we never looked back," Hall-Patton said.
Walker agreed, noting "without deregulation, we never would have seen the growth at the airport that we have experienced."
Deregulation ushered in an era of master-planned growth that would stretch into the late 1990s, creating another stress upon the system to grow -- and grow quickly.
The county's McCarran 2000 project was adopted in 1978 and funded by a $300 million bond in 1982 -- the largest airport bond issued in the United States up to that time, Hall-Patton said.
The first phase of McCarran 2000 opened in 1985 and was completed by 1987. That was followed by the construction in the 1990s of the D gates, a modification of the original McCarran 2000 plan, Hall-Paton said.
Now the construction of a second major airport is being explored at Ivanpah. Walker said that airport, which could open as early as 2013, will be built at a cost of $1 billion to $2 billion and require a build-out capacity of McCarran's current visitor volume.
The proposed facility is sure to be scrutinized as was McCarran for its remote location more than a half century ago.
"When McCarran was built, many people said it was too far out of town," Hall-Patton said. "Now look, it is surrounded by the town.
"No one could foresee the insane growth. And, if the water (supply) holds up, who can say for sure now when the growth will end?"
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