The people who run Baltimore-Washington International Airport have a problem. It's a big problem -- one that could wind up costing $1 billion or more to fix.
But it's a problem that makes just about every other airport in the country jealous: Maryland's international airport won't stop growing.
Passengers keep showing up en masse -- maybe 17 million in 1999, almost 2 million more than the year before. They bring their cars and luggage, and their friends and relatives, and every month it seems there are more than the last.
And so eventually -- maybe this year -- Baltimore-Washington International Airport won't have enough room for all those people.
A new runway
Flush with business, BWI's planners find themselves scrambling to build practically an entire new airport.
If the growth continues -- and they think it will -- BWI will need new parking lots, a new passenger terminal, new airplane parking spaces and an entire new runway in the coming years.
"That's the big one -- the runway," said David L. Blackshear, BWI's executive director. "I always assume that a parallel runway costs a billion dollars. It might be more, it might be less, but that's what you have to figure on -- a billion dollars."
It's all a big headache for Maryland's transportation officials, but it's one they've been working for years to induce.
Southwest brings prosperity
As recently as six years ago, state officials wondered whether BWI would ever be a major American gateway. Its biggest airline, US Airways, was pulling out flights in favor of the Washington area's newer landing strip -- Washington Dulles International Airport.
Today, everything has changed. Southwest Airlines now rules at BWI, flying 95 flights a day and building Baltimore into an East Coast hub. It will add a new city -- Albany, N.Y. -- later this year, and possibly more before 2001.
When Southwest first came to BWI in 1993, it flew only eight daily flights to two cities. As the airline has grown, so has BWI.
Final figures for 1999 won't be released until next month, but a month before the year ended, BWI already had surpassed its 1998 record by nearly 1 million passengers.
Early estimates suggest the airport moved as many as 17 million passengers last year -- a 12.6 percent increase from the year before and BWI's sixth straight year of record-setting growth. Virtually all of the airport's carriers handled more passengers last year than the year before, Southwest in particular.
