a new world airport and its baggage

2026-09-20 Read as: PDF, plaintext Aviation came to Denver mainly in the form of mail. Like much of the inland West, the first airfields served a smattering of passenger flights (both expensive and uncomfortable in the 1930s) and a regular schedule of contract mail carriers. Postal Service air mail contracts built many of the nation's major airlines—and its major airports. One of Denver's simple airstrips, Denver Municipal Airport, transformed from a mail stop to a busy airport when Continental Airlines moved its headquarters to Denver 1937, and then again when a modern passenger terminal was completed in 1946. Along the way, it had been renamed for the mayor who oversaw much of its development: Stapleton. The Second World War, and then the post-war return, brought both a boom in aviation generally and in Denver specifically. The city's population grew by almost 10,000 a year from 1940 to 1960. During the '60s, Stapleton gained an additional runway and a new terminal as the schedule grew from under forty departures a day to over one hundred. When airline deregulation prompted a total restructuring of the industry, both by consolidation and widespread adoption of a "hub and spoke" model, Denver's central location made it an obvious choice of hub. United, Continental, Western, and Frontier Airlines all made Denver Stapleton a busy node in their growing networks. With growing traffic, Stapleton showed its age. The passenger terminals were too small, but moreover, the field had become cramped. The runways were too close to each other for more than one simultaneous approach during instrument conditions, a bottleneck so severe that bad weather in Denver would cause flight delays that cascaded nationwide. The airfield at Stapleton could not be expanded: a combination of terrain, adjacent land in private ownership, and legal disputes with nearby residents and Adams County (where Stapleton was located) effectively precluded any runway additions or extensions. By the '80s, Southwest Airlines was rapidly expanding beyond its native Texas—but service to Denver was blocked by a lack of available gates at Stapleton. By fluke of politics, the City of Denver was abruptly committed to construction of a brand-new airport in 1983: mayoral candidate Monte Pascoe had made a New World Airport the core of his platform. As it happened, he came up third in a race of three, but not before goading the other two candidates—including winner Frederico Peña—into signing a written commitment to see the new airport through. In 1984, planning started for the New Denver Airport. 48.3 square miles of Adams County were annexed to Denver and, in 1989, Denver voters approved a referendum in favor of the new airport by a wide margin. Located northeast of Denver on a huge plot of mostly agricultural land, many of us have been there, at least on a layover: Denver International Airport, DIA 1. From the New World Order to contracting scandals to "Blucifer," DIA is an infamous airport. Some level of, well, intrigue was probably guaranteed. DIA was the first major airport project in the United States since Dallas-Fort Worth in 1974. DIA planners, later defending their efforts, noted that they had extensively studied the lessons learned from comparable US projects since the Second World War, of which they had identified only two. One of the largest public works projects to date, DIA's budget started around $3 billion and ended at nearly $5. Along the way, a lot went wrong. This is not a full history of DIA's awkward early years. That would require a book, and a challenging one to write given that the ensuing lawsuits, political scandal, and media attention mean that many of the facts are disputed. But before we reach our main story, it will be helpful to understand some of the context in which DIA was formed. By the time primary construction was underway in 1990, DIA was slated to be one of the largest airports in the nation. Despite that, it technically had no airlines. Political details of the project's initiation meant it went ahead without the explicit support of any of its expected tenants. United Airlines would be the largest by far, occupying all of the large B terminal, but negotiations between the City and United did not land a commitment from that airline until over a year into construction. Continental Airlines had agreed earlier, but had just gone bankrupt for a second time in a decade, and Denver came to worry that they would not ultimately be good for the lease payments on the A terminal being built for them. The C terminal, intended for all of the other airlines, remained unoccupied. In the mean time, Denver's booming post-war economy had considerably slowed, turning the airport into an almost completely debt-funded project. The result was that the airlines, and specifically United Airlines, gained enormous leverage over the design of the airport. That itself is common, but DIA had the unique challenge that the airlines became the dominant stakeholder in its design only after much of the design was complete. While everyone disagrees with everyone else on who was at fault and for what, I think this is a fair napkin sketch: the first two years of serious effort on DIA were led by the City, motivated mostly by factors like tourism and prestige and with little thought for the operational practicalities of a massive airport. In the second two years, United Airlines came on the scene and attempted to reshape the partially-built airport to their aggressive operational requirements. And those requirements were a formidable challenge. DIA's scale meant that it would be split between four buildings, a ticketing/baggage concourse and the three terminals. This layout allowed room for an ample number of gates. At the same time, congestion on the airfield itself had been a challenge at Stapleton and an issue that the airlines were extremely sensitive to. United Airlines ultimately agreed to operate out of DIA only if the airport could meet United's goal of a breakneck operational tempo with aircraft turned around in under 35 minutes 2. To keep taxiing aircraft in motion, the terminals were separated widely so that the "alleys" in between could accommodate aircraft at gates, a row of aircraft waiting for gates on each side, and still have room for two taxiing jets to pass each other. It is, in effect, something like six taxiways between each terminal. The measurements work out such that terminals A, B, and C are about 0.5, 1, and 1.5 km from the ticketing building. The buildings are not connected at the surface (except, today, terminal A and ticketing). Instead, DIA used an innovative design in which all movement between the buildings happens underground. This allowed a far more open airfield design than at large airports with above-ground halls (consider, for example, Phoenix), enabling a traffic concept where aircraft would land on one side of the field, taxi to a gate, continue away from the gate in the same direction, and take off from the other side of the field. The building layout and connecting tunnel became one of the project's first weaknesses. Airlines, making their late entry into the project, quickly accumulated design changes that they made hard requirements to their leases. Underground construction is notoriously difficult to modify, though, leading to an expensive set of changes that sometimes required almost complete demolition and reconstruction of parts of buildings. By the time United Airlines signed an agreement, at the end of 1991, the project was already behind schedule and over budget. Among DIA's most interesting facets are the conspiracy theories. The decision to name the commission that organized its grand opening the "New World Airport Commission" didn't help, on account of its close resemblance to the New World Order which was a more prominent vein of conspiracizing in the early '90s. Early '90s aesthetic sensibilities were factor as well: Michael Singer's officially untitled "Interior Garden" at Terminal C 3, and Luis Jiménez's "Mustang" placed prominently at the approach of Peña Boulevard, have a certain eerie presence. Leo Tanguma's murals in the baggage claim area are rooted in the Mexican Socialist tradition of murals that look to the future with equal parts optimism and uncertainty. They depict themes of war and peace, of harmony and discord, and moreover the tension between them—in a way that is perhaps a bit too visceral for jet-lagged travelers. As with all conspiracy theories, there is of course a kernel of truth. There really were strange things happening underground at DIA. The project really did have its secrets, and it really did envision a future very different from its present. On the other hand, these quiet happenings were all more pedestrian, more municipal, than the conspiracy theorists like to think. This was a new world airport, not an order. DIA's expansive basement was not intended, as some contend, as a logistical center for hundreds of thousands of bodies. It corrals something more everyday, and in even larger numbers: bags. One of the most arduous parts of an aircraft's turnaround is the loading and unloading of baggage. The problem is particularly acute at a large field like DIA, where bags have to cover considerable distances. Consider the case of a passenger checking in for a flight out of Terminal C: the passenger will need to travel over a mile to their gate, a problem solved by the $84 million Westinghouse APM100 automated guideway transit system. 26 autonomous vehicles run a never-ending loop of the underground connector tunnel, serving stops at each terminal every 90 seconds. This system has not been trouble-free, but the APM100 was a descendant of the 1970s techno-optimist "transit plowshares program" that saw defense and aerospace contractors apply their expertise to urban transit. While this program mostly failed to improve urban transit, it did a lot for airports, and by the time DIA was