Miami International Airport (MIA) has just made an exciting announcement. I know what you’re thinking — how could the world’s finest airport become even better? Sorry, I’m kidding… obviously that would be unfair to Cairo!
Continue reading: Miami Airport’s New Concourse K Will Add Six Gates, Open In 2029
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Oh, great. Yet another concourse miles away from the perpetually non-working moving walkways heading to the even more distant tram to the rental car center that is for all intents and purposes located in Doral. MIA is one of the least convenient and poorly maintained airports in the U.S.
Seems like a lot of effort and investment for six gates, narrow-body at that… space must be really tight for this to be worth it.
I would prefer it if they invested in some moving walkways in concourse D. Honestly, that would be the #1 thing AA should do to improve (my) customer experience.
Ben,
Since you mentioned Concourse K will be replacing Concourse G, it seems there will be no additional capacity to additional passenger volume. Or will they knock down the existing Concourse G and replace it with something new?
I’ll never understand the MIA hate. Sure, it’s a terrible airport. But it’s so much better than DFW or CLT.
Moving walkways are a thing of the past in airports. They create a wall between the concourse and retail operations. The terminal operators hate them because of this
Six whole gates, huh? Wow. What an innovation. The question remains as to why they'd be adding new flavours when they can't even get vanilla right?
@ brandote -- Agree on CLT, disagree on DFW. At least at DFW, all the terminals are connected airside, and one of the terminals is nice. That's more than can be said about MIA!
@ Waynaro -- Yeah, Concourse G actually has more gates than Concourse K will have, so I'm a bit confused there as well. Does anyone know what's going on, because that's potentially a significant reduction in capacity. Given the goal of 77 million passengers per year, how exactly is that supposed to be achieved?
@ Nate -- Yep, as pointed out by 305, it's no coincidence that moving walkways are becoming less common. They're not good for business, and airports are shopping malls that just happen to have gates.
@Ben @Waynaro - As far as I know, Concourse G at MIA is rarely used for its full capacity. Very few airlines operate out of that concourse, and they can easily be reacommodated in other concourses with the current setup. Its essentially the concourse for airlines who can't find space in other concourses at MIA.
I am curious whether they rebuild something else in that space though, and I assume that will be the case once Concourse K is finished.
What? MIA and CLT are not horrible airports. I enjoy them and they are easy to get around. Well CLT was before the construction and based on the UA portion of Concourse A, it will be once completed.
One thing that should probably be clarified (at least based on the marketing designs they show) is that the new concourse will be able to handle widebodies and likely will be marked for them, but they'll block at least two gates if more than two widebodies are at the terminal.
Again, based on what they're showing, it can concurrently service 6 narrowbodies, or 3 widebodies + 1 narrow, or lower combinations of the latter.
Modernization in Action is a real project?! I just thought it was a fancy way of saying "this moving sidewalk is permanently out of order."
@Ben fair enough, but I think terminal D at DFW gets too much credit for being “nice”….nicer, yes. I think what makes an airport good is too heavily weighted on passenger experience. E.g., everyone hates on Miami but Miami has great accessibility to downtown and Miami Beach (DFW does not). LAX has a terrible curbside situation, but the airfield has four parallel runways and nearly perfect weather year round (LAX is never given credit for this). So yeah terminal D is nice and you’ll prob spend a lot of time there due to terrible Dallas weather and a generally shitty AA operation.
Another great opportunity for the Perputal Corruption Pit of Indulgence known as MIA. (HT to Holly Hegeman).
Nice to see *something* new (anything) coming to MIA. The airport design is just awful (though I vaguely recall it being even worse before the current version of concourse D was built), cramped where it should be spacious, sprawling in all the wrong ways, a depressing large-scale primitive experience for visitors.
Watch them assign Spirit to this prime new real estate lol
$20 says is finished in 2049 lol they can’t even fix the leaks in the roof and flooding in the terminals
@Ben their plan is to build Concourse K (~2029), which facilitates tearing down G (~2027-2033). Once G is torn down, they'll build a new Concourse F in its place (~2035), to allow for the demolition of the existing F and widen the aprons between E-new F, and new F-H to allow for better aircraft movements.
Concourse K will also include lounge space.
https://www.miami-airport.com/capital_improvement.asp
I do not see how MIA is better connected than DFW.
Yes, MIA has a train to downtown Miami that appears to take about 40 minutes.
DFW has trains to all parts of Dallas via DART as well as direct rail service to Fort Worth. The silver line of DART will go directly from DFW to Plano.
Parking at DFW is readily available in all terminals which is great for O&D pax and the airport is so massive that it has dual freeway entrances at the North and South sides.
I will say I prefer the rental car train at MIA to terminal buses at DFW as a nonresident and it looks like the parking options for the garage are actually a bit cheaper than DFW.
LAX should have its "curbside" issue fixed 1st quarter of 2026 when the Automated People Mover (APM) is functional and the rail lines come on line.
Drop offs outside of the "horseshoe" and a ride in on the APM.
How about first expanding the highway 836 exit to MIA? It’s the most ridiculous design I have seen. The highway exit starts with 2 lanes and then merging into 1 lane (to give way to another non-airport local exit) for a mile before expanding again to 2 +lanes. Traffic jam ALL THE TIME!