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By now, Tomball resident Kyle Daniels is used to budgeting extra time for construction delays when he heads to Bush Intercontinental Airport.

On the approach road, cars compete for space with construction equipment. Inside the airport, travelers flying out of two terminals funnel through security lines for one.

“The construction has been awful,” Daniels said last week.

Houston Airport System officials say the end of a $1.43 billion rebuild of Bush airport’s international terminal is within sight. Even as that years-long effort comes to an end, officials are making plans for a lengthy, $2.6 billion renovation of United’s Terminal B. Work also will continue at Hobby Airport, which is about to undergo a $470 million project to add seven new gates.

Airport leaders say all the construction is necessary to keep up with passenger numbers that have caught up with pre-pandemic rates and promise to keep growing. While officials say they are doing their best to limit congestion, the construction work could affect travel to Bush airport for years to come.

A little-noticed project at the airport shows the construction is not ending anytime soon.

A building for building

In July, City Council approved the final payment for a building tucked away off Will Clayton Parkway that symbolizes the Houston Airport System’s ambitious expansion plans.

The $18 million project management office opened in 2019 to serve as headquarters for the rebuild of Terminal D, which handles international flights.

Prep work on the renovations began in 2017, and airport officials hope to wrap the project up by the end of 2024. 

When completed, the terminal will feature a new “central processor” with check-ins for flights and 17 security lanes, a renovated terminal concourse, additional gates on a new pier, a copper ceiling and a 380-foot-long LED feature.

The work is sorely needed because of aging facilities and rising passenger traffic, airport leaders say. This year’s Thanksgiving travel period was expected to set a record with 2.4 million passengers, an increase of 6 percent over the same period in 2019.

Even before the pandemic, the Houston Airport System said Terminal D was at capacity four to five weeks out of the year and had undergone only minor improvements since it opened in 1990, despite quadrupling in traffic.

Overall, all of Houston’s airports are back to pre-pandemic passenger levels. The system says that it had 4,956,000 passengers in the 12 months through October 2023, compared to 4,965,000 over the same span through October 2019.

Pain in the process

Most of the renovated Terminal D should be open to passengers next month, airport chief Mario Diaz said last month.

Progress has not come without pain. For the self-funded airport system, there have been repeated cost overruns. Earlier this month, at-large City Councilmember Sallie Alcorn asked one airport executive if he expected the price to stick to the most recent estimate of $1.43 billion.

“That’s still the budget. We’re still aiming to hit that,” said Steven Andersen, who oversees the international terminal project.

For travelers, years of construction work often have translated into long delays in their trips to Bush airport. The congestion seemed to peak in 2021 and 2022, when there were widespread reports of missed flights because of lanes blocked off to regular traffic. On some days, worried travelers even hopped out of cars and hoofed it to make flights.

As the airport handled the pre-Thanksgiving travel surge Wednesday morning, there were few signs of chaos on airport roads or inside the terminals.

“It didn’t seem like that much compared to other times,” Evan Hofland, a 22-year-old undergraduate at Rice University, said about the traffic approaching the airport. “In the past, it’s taken 20 or 30 minutes.”

In preparation for holiday travel, the airport system tamped down on construction work involving road lanes, said Augusto Bernal, an airport system spokesperson. He said the traffic situation is much improved this year compared to last.

“The impact on the roadways has minimized. You have more lanes that are available right now,” he said.

The biggest headache on the roadways in the coming weeks may involve the installation of a 209-foot wide canopy over the international terminal’s departures curb. Each of the canopy’s eight, 80- to 90-ton trusses require deliveries from 14 semi trucks.

“We work with the airlines, so they basically tell us what’s the ideal time or the duration of the time slots to bring in these large trucks with deliveries,” Bernal said. “We try to accommodate between flight banks.”

Terminal construction

Even when the massive international terminal project comes to an end, construction at the airport will not.

In the coming months, United hopes to begin work on an even larger project that will rebuild Bush airport’s Terminal B from the ground up.

In May, United officials gave a presentation to City Council sketching out a construction period that would stretch to the middle of 2026.

The Terminal B project has been mired in a dispute between Mayor Sylvester Turner and City Controller Chris Brown over whether the company and airport officials have provided enough details on its financing.

Brown has used his power as controller to block City Council from voting on the first $150 million payment from the city to the airline to begin construction. It is unclear how the ongoing dispute could affect the construction timeline.

Turner repeatedly has explained that the airport system’s funding comes from airline fees rather than taxpayers. He also noted at a Nov. 15 council meeting that the airline has committed to chipping in nearly $2 billion to the overall $2.5 billion project budget.

“We’re talking about over 3,500 jobs being created right here in Texas, and they are shouldering more than two thirds of the cost of this project,” Turner said.

Brown said it is critical to make sure the city’s money is being spent well. In a statement Wednesday, Brown said his concerns about the lack of a feasibility study “have yet to be remedied.”

“Until concerns relating to the lack of an updated feasibility study have been addressed, I will continue to advocate for increased due diligence over the agreement,” he continued.

City Council was set to consider the matter again Wednesday, according to an agenda.

Whenever the project begins, it could lead to more complaints from logjam-weary travelers. United appears to be keenly aware about the ongoing frustrations.

In a presentation to City Council in May, the company promised to use “sophisticated modeling efforts” to predict the impacts construction would have on traffic. Aubrey Jackson, a United spokesperson, said in a statement that the company aims for the construction to have “minimal impact” on roadway traffic.

“First, United is working with a nationally recognized transportation engineering firm to counsel and guide the planning and execution of the work,” Jackson said. “Second, United is working in close collaboration with the Houston Airport System to track and monitor construction activity through the construction process.”

Daniels, who estimated that he flies in and out of Bush airport about 20 times a year, said he had not heard of the pending Terminal B project. As he waited in a customer service line for help with a delayed flight to Charlotte on Wednesday, he said he hoped this project would go more smoothly than the last.

“This one doesn’t seem like it’s going so well,” Daniels said. “Not looking forward to that.”

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