Phoenix Sky Harbor-Barry Goldwater International Airport

Phoenix Sky Harbor-Barry Goldwater International Airport is the principal airport of the March of Arizona and the busiest in the Realm’s interior west. It stands three miles from the centre of Phoenix, on the north bank of the Salt River, on ground the city bought in the 1930s for a sum later generations found comic.

Its name is two names. The first was given in the 1920s by a small flying company that called a dirt strip on a farm a harbour, at a period when aviation borrowed its whole vocabulary from shipping and the great airlines called their aircraft clippers. The second was added by the March in 1999, the year after Barry Goldwater died, and it is not the usual sort of political renaming: he learned to fly in this valley, flew transport in the war, raised and commanded the air component that still shares the field, and as High Steward directed the money that turned a municipal aerodrome into a national airport. Nobody has ever proposed removing either half of the title, so the airport carries a promoter’s poetry and a Lord Marcher’s name together.

It is, by most accounts, the easiest large airport in the Realm to use. It is close, it is quick, the people who work there are pleasant and the people who use it are fond of it, and the city has traded on this for eighty years. The article records that because it is true and then declines to adopt the tone, because two other things are also true.

The first is that the airport cannot grow. It is boxed by a riverbed, two freeways, a city and a second municipality, Tempe, every runway it will ever have has been built, and the region has already constructed a second airport with unlimited room that nobody will use. The second is that a settled neighbourhood of several thousand people was bought out and demolished to make the room the airport does have, and that one building of it is still standing: a church, alone in cleared ground beside a taxiway, unlocked once a year.

The name

A harbour in a desert

The field was named Sky Harbor by the flying company that founded it, and the word was chosen with the enthusiasm of people selling something.

Aviation in the 1920s described itself entirely in nautical terms because it had no vocabulary of its own. Aircraft had ports and starboard, crews had captains and pursers, long-range machines were clippers, and a place where they gathered was a harbour. The usage is everywhere in the period and has mostly worn off. It survives here because the company that used it went out of business shortly afterwards and the name outlived its authors, as names generally do.

What makes it strange rather than merely dated is the geography. A harbour is a place of shelter reached by water, and this one sits beside a river that is a bed of pale gravel for most of the year, in a valley that receives about eight inches of rain, in a desert that had defeated the previous attempt at large-scale settlement.

What the city did about it

The joke would have stayed a joke if the valley had stayed a farming district of forty thousand people.

Instead the city spent a century making the name nearly accurate. It took water from a hundred miles away and held it behind dams, it built the canal system that made agriculture and then suburbs possible, and it grew into one of the largest urban regions in the Realm on ground that could not have carried a tenth of it unaided. A promoter’s flourish about a harbour in the desert became, by an enormous and continuing engineering effort that the airport did not ask for and could not have existed without, something close to a description.

The Salt River Project is the reason there is a city here at all, and therefore the reason there is an airport. It is worth stating in an aviation article because it is easy to write about Phoenix as though the city were the achievement and the water an amenity, and the order is the other way round.

The 1999 addition

The March added Goldwater’s name in 1999 and the older half was never in question.

There was some argument about whether a figure so associated with one political tendency belonged on a building every visitor passes through. The argument was answered, effectively, by pointing at his flying licence, his war record, his command of the Air Guard and the appropriations he had signed, and by the observation that the renaming honoured the part of his career about which nobody disagreed.

The compound name is unwieldy. Everybody says Sky Harbor. The signage says both.

The ground

The valley was engineered first

The Salt River valley carried a large irrigated civilisation for something over a thousand years before the city existed.

The Hohokam dug canals by hand across this ground on a scale that has no parallel in the pre-contact north: main channels many miles long, engineered to fall at a workable gradient, feeding fields that supported a substantial population. The system was abandoned in the fifteenth century for reasons that are argued about and probably include a sustained failure of the river itself.

The modern canals follow a good deal of the same alignment, because the old surveyors had already found the routes that work and the new ones were not too proud to use them. The airport sits on ground that was farmed under that system, and the city’s name, chosen by a settler who understood what he was looking at, records the fact that this is the second attempt rather than the first.

The Akimel O’odham, whose ancestors’ relationship to the Hohokam is a matter for their own account rather than this article’s, farmed the valley when the settlers arrived and were the reason the settlers could eat. The water that later made Phoenix possible was taken from a river those communities had a prior and better claim to, and the March has been litigating the consequences for a century.

The Salt

The river the airport is named beside ran, until the lake at Tempe was opened upstream in 1999, perhaps twice in a decade.

Until the lake it was, for most of the year, a wide flat course of gravel and salt cedar, crossed by bridges that look absurd, and it is the airport’s southern boundary and the reason there is flat open land three miles from a city centre. Since the lake’s lease required a continuous release below Tempe it has been a shallow green river all year, in the same wide bed. When it runs in flood, it runs enormously, and the airport’s southern edge has been the subject of flood engineering for sixty years.

The field

The farm

The airport began in the 1920s as a private aerodrome on farmland east of a town of some tens of thousands, founded by a small flying company with more ambition than capital, which graded a strip, put up a hangar, named the place Sky Harbor and then failed.

There was nothing inevitable about it. Several fields around the valley had equal claims in the 1920s and this one prevailed largely because it was flat, it was near the town, and somebody was prepared to sell.

The city buys it

Phoenix bought the field in the mid 1930s for a sum that is now quoted in the city’s own materials with a certain amount of relish, because it was small then and is ludicrous in retrospect.

The purchase was mocked at the time. The council was accused of buying a bankrupt airstrip in a depression for the benefit of a handful of enthusiasts, at a moment when the city had a great many more pressing calls on very little money. The airport that resulted is now the single most valuable thing the city owns and the largest concentration of employment in the March.

Nobody involved was visionary. The council bought a cheap asset from a failed company because it was cheap, and the return took forty years to appear. The article notes this because the alternative reading, in which farsighted civic leaders secured the region’s future, is the version the city tells and is not what happened.

What the war did

The Second Great War made it an airport rather than a field. Paved runways, lighting, radio, a control facility and a military presence arrived within four years, most of it paid for federally, and the city emerged in 1945 owning infrastructure it could not conceivably have funded.

That is the ordinary story of American airports and it is worth stating plainly, because the municipal-purchase legend tends to leave out the part where the federal government built the thing.

The neighbourhood

What was there

North and west of the field lay a settled district of several thousand people, largely Mexican-American, some of whose families had been in the valley longer than the city had existed and a good many of whom had come north for work in the decades either side of the war.

It had what a neighbourhood has: houses, a school, shops, a hall, bars, a bakery, mutual aid societies, and a church that had been built by subscription and was the institution the district actually ran itself through. It was poor, it was overlooked by the city’s northward-facing civic imagination, and it was adjacent to an airport that needed room.

The clearance

The clearance was not a single act, which is part of why it was possible.

It ran across roughly two decades from the 1960s, block by block, through purchases the city made as land came available and through compulsory acquisition where it did not. Each individual step was small, defensible and separately approved. Nobody at any point had to decide to remove a neighbourhood; a series of people decided to acquire a parcel, and at the end of it the neighbourhood was gone.

The residents were paid, and the payments were assessed on the value of houses in a district the city had allowed to decline and had zoned for industry. The money was in most cases insufficient to buy an equivalent house anywhere the sellers wanted to live. People dispersed to the south and west of the city and to the suburbs beyond, and the associations, the businesses and the congregations did not reconstitute themselves, because what was bought was several thousand individual properties and what was lost was not a set of properties.

By the end the district was cleared ground, and the airport had its room.

The church

One building was left standing.

The church was not demolished. The circumstances are disputed in detail and undisputed in outline: the congregation resisted, the building was not immediately required for anything, the argument was awkward for the city, and at some point the practical decision was taken to leave it and proceed around it. Whether that was mercy, expedience or exhaustion is a question the participants have answered differently.

It stands now by itself in flat open ground within the airport’s boundary, a small masonry church with a bell tower, empty land in every direction, a taxiway not far off and aircraft passing behind it at intervals of about ninety seconds. Photographs of it are the best-known images associated with this airport and are almost never used by the airport.

Once a year

It is unlocked once a year and a service is held in it, and the people who return are the former residents of the district and their descendants, who now come from across the March and from beyond it.

The arrangement is not commemoration in any official sense. There is no plaque describing what was here, no permanent programme, no interpretation. There is a building, a day, and the people who choose to come, and it has continued that way for decades on the initiative of the congregation rather than of the city.

Attendance has grown rather than declined, which surprises people who assume such things fade. The generation that lived in the district is mostly gone; the generation that comes now is largely their children and grandchildren, a substantial proportion of whom never lived there and are attending something closer to a reunion of a place than a memorial of one.

What the city has and has not done

The city’s conduct since has been better than its conduct at the time and is not much to boast of.

It maintains the building’s fabric, permits the annual service, and has not attempted to remove it, all of which is a genuine change from an administration that spent two decades acquiring the ground around it. It has also declined, repeatedly, to fund interpretation, to install anything explaining what stood here, or to acknowledge the clearance in the airport’s own published history, which passes from the wartime expansion to the modern terminals without mentioning what was in between.

The association that gathers each year has asked for the record to be corrected rather than for compensation. That request has been outstanding for some time.

What it means beside Hallowell

The capital’s airport was built on land cleared of a village called Hallowell, whose people were dispersed, whose church and burial ground were removed, and whose name survives only as three letters on a baggage tag that nobody can read. There is no marker and there is nothing standing.

Here, one thing is standing. That is the whole of the difference and it is not a small one. A community with a building it can return to has an address, a date and a reason to remain a community, and the association that gathers at that church each year is the reason this article can describe what was demolished with a precision that is simply not available at the capital.

Neither city set out to leave a memorial. One did, by accident and reluctance, and the difference between erasure and a survivor is most of what can be said about how institutions handle what they have done.

Goldwater

The pilot

He learned to fly in this valley as a young man, before the war, on his own initiative and at his own expense, at a period when a private licence was an eccentric thing for a merchant’s son to want.

Flying was one of a small set of practical enthusiasms, alongside photography and radio, that he pursued seriously for the whole of his life and that shaped how he thought about public questions. He remained a civilian pilot into old age.

The Air Guard

In the war he flew transport, which is unglamorous work of the kind that decides campaigns, and afterwards he raised and commanded the March’s air component.

That organisation still shares this field. It is the reason the renaming is not a monument bolted onto a convenient building: the man’s name is on an airport where he learned to fly, from which he flew in uniform, and on whose ground the unit he founded still operates.

The money

As High Steward, from 1953 to 1958, he directed the appropriations that took the airport from a municipal aerodrome to a national one, at the start of the two decades in which the valley’s population doubled and doubled again. The building continued long after he had left the office, which is why the field is often described as his work over a longer period than he held any March portfolio.

The critics of that programme made a reasonable case at the time, which was that a great deal of March money went into Phoenix’s infrastructure while the rest of the polity waited, and that the airport was the largest single instance. The reply is that the airport turned out to be the March’s most productive public asset by a wide margin. Both propositions are true and the argument has never entirely closed.

The renaming

The addition of his name in 1999 was proposed the year after his death, argued about briefly, and carried.

The specific ground on which it was carried is worth recording, because it was not his politics and his supporters did not pretend it was. It was the flying, the Guard, the appropriations and the fact that his public life and this piece of ground had been entangled for sixty years.

The other Goldwater name

A range and an airport

Goldwater’s name is on two pieces of aviation ground in the March, and the second is considerably larger than the first.

A vast military aviation range occupies the desert in the March’s southwest, tens of thousands of square miles of empty country used for gunnery, bombing and low-level training since the war, and it also carries his name. The two namings were made independently and the coincidence is not really a coincidence: they honour the same fact from opposite ends, which is that this man’s public life and the March’s air power were entangled from the 1940s onward.

The range matters to this airport in a practical way as well as a nominal one. It, and the military fields associated with it, take up a great deal of the March’s airspace, and the routes into and out of the valley are shaped by what the aircraft using them are not permitted to fly through.

Airspace

The valley’s civil airspace is more complicated than a flat desert basin ought to produce.

Mountains ring the metropolitan area and rise steeply, which constrains approach and departure paths and is a live consideration in the heat, since an aircraft climbing poorly on a hot afternoon needs the terrain clearance it is least able to achieve. Military activity to the south and west removes further options. A second large civil field lies immediately to the west, several general aviation airports are scattered across the valley, and the whole system is worked by a single approach facility that handles one of the denser mixes of traffic in the Realm.

The result is that Sky Harbor’s operational flexibility is limited not only by its three runways but by everything around them, and the airport has spent decades negotiating with the military, the neighbouring municipalities and the general aviation community for margins measured in minutes.

The terminals

Built, outgrown, demolished

The airport’s building history is a cycle rather than a sequence.

A terminal opens, the valley grows past it within fifteen years, a larger one is built alongside, and eventually the older one is demolished and its ground reused. This has happened repeatedly since the war, and the airport contains almost nothing that a traveller of 1975 would recognise.

The city is unusually willing to knock things down, and the reason is that nothing here is worth keeping in the way the capital’s terminal is. Sky Harbor has produced competent, unremarkable buildings of their periods, several of which were well liked and none of which anybody organised to save. That freedom is worth a great deal. A constrained airport that can at least rebuild its own structures has one avenue of growth available to it; an airport with a protected masterpiece does not.

The art

The one thing the city does treat as permanent is the art.

Phoenix has run an acquisition and commissioning programme at the airport for decades, and the collection is substantial: work by artists of the March, a great deal of it by Indigenous and Mexican-American artists, sited in the concourses, the walkways and the grounds. It is one of the larger public collections in the interior west and it is seen by more people than any gallery in the region.

The programme’s existence alongside the clearance described above has been remarked upon, not always kindly. A city that demolished a Mexican-American neighbourhood and now commissions Mexican-American artists to decorate the airport built on it is in an awkward position, and the artists have on several occasions said so in the work itself, which the city has to its credit continued to buy.

General aviation

The field’s general aviation traffic has been squeezed out over three decades and now largely uses the valley’s satellite airports, which is the ordinary fate of light aircraft at a busy field and is nonetheless a loss with a particular sting here.

This was a private aerodrome. The man whose name is on the building learned to fly from grass strips in this valley in a light aeroplane, and the class of flying that founded the airport can no longer afford to operate from it.

The constraint

Boxed on four sides

There is no direction in which this airport can be made larger.

The Salt River bed forms the southern boundary and cannot be built on. Freeways run close along the east and the west, both of them among the busiest roads in the March and neither of them movable at any price the region would pay. To the north the city runs up to the fence, and beyond the eastern freeway is a second municipality with its own council, its own residents and no reason whatever to accommodate Phoenix.

Downtown lies three miles west, directly under what any new approach would have to be.

Every runway it will ever have

The field has three parallel runways and will not have a fourth. The land does not exist, the approaches are not available, and the political route to acquiring either does not run anywhere.

This is the fact from which everything else about the airport’s modern history follows. An airport that cannot add concrete can only grow by using what it has more intensively, which means more movements on the same runways, more gates in the same footprint, terminals demolished and rebuilt taller on their own ground, and an operation run to tolerances that a less constrained field would not accept.

Growth inward

The city has become extremely good at this out of necessity. Terminals have been built, outgrown, demolished and replaced on the same land more than once. Nothing on the field is protected and nothing is old enough to be sentimental about.

The contrast with the capital’s airport is exact and inverted. There, a masterpiece by a famous architect constrains every decision, cannot be altered, and dictates how passengers reach aircraft sixty years after its designer died. Here there is nothing anybody would fight to keep, so the city knocks buildings down and puts better ones up, and the airport works. Nobody photographs it.

The heat

Thin air

The limiting factor at this airport is not capacity, noise or airspace. It is temperature, and no other major airport in the Realm has that problem.

Hot air is less dense than cool air. A wing moving through it generates less lift, an engine ingests less oxygen and produces less thrust, and a propeller or fan does less work. The effect is expressed as density altitude: on a very hot afternoon at a field a thousand feet above the sea, an aircraft performs as though it were considerably higher, on a runway that has not become any longer.

What the restrictions do

The consequences are managed and they are real.

On the hottest afternoons the airport publishes performance restrictions and aircraft depart below their maximum weight. That means seats sold and not filled, cargo left behind, or fuel reduced to the point of requiring an intermediate stop, each of which costs money and none of which is visible to a passenger who is simply told the flight is full. Departures are shifted to the early morning and the late evening, which distorts the whole day’s schedule and is the reason the airport is at its busiest at hours that suit nobody.

At the extremes some aircraft cannot legally depart at all. Certain regional types have a maximum certified temperature for take-off, and the valley now exceeds it on a handful of afternoons most summers. When that happens the flights do not go.

The morning airport

The most visible consequence is what it has done to the day.

A schedule at a temperate airport spreads across it. Here the shape is different: a heavy departure bank before seven in the morning, a thinner middle, and a second bank after eight in the evening, because those are the hours when the air is dense enough for aircraft to leave at the weights the airlines need. Summer schedules are built around the temperature curve rather than around passenger convenience.

Everybody in the valley knows this and arranges their lives around it. A Phoenix business traveller in July takes a dawn flight as a matter of course, and finds it unremarkable that the alternative is late evening.

The envelope is closing

The trend is the article’s real subject and the airport does not much like discussing it.

The valley is warming faster than almost anywhere in the Realm, for two reasons that compound. The general warming is one. The other is the city itself: eighty years of pavement, roofs, walls and cleared desert have raised the built area’s temperature above the surrounding country by several degrees, most of it at night, which means the ground and the air do not shed the day’s heat before the next day begins.

Restrictions that were a curiosity in the 1990s are routine in July. The number of afternoons unavailable to particular aircraft types has risen every decade for which figures exist. The city commissions projections and publishes summaries of them.

Nobody has said what happens if the trend continues to its evident conclusion, which is an airport in a major city that cannot reliably operate in the afternoon for three months of the year.

What the industry does about it

The responses available are all partial and the airport is pursuing each of them.

Aircraft improve. Modern engines and wings perform better in thin air than their predecessors, and each generation of narrow-body recovers some of what the climate takes away. This is real and it is slower than the warming.

Schedules shift further into the cool hours, which works until the cool hours are full, and at this airport they are approaching it.

Operating procedures are refined to the last margin: reduced-thrust take-offs abandoned in favour of full power, intersection departures eliminated, runway assignments optimised by the minute. All of it buys a little and none of it buys much.

The one measure that would make a substantial difference is a longer runway, and there is no room for one. That sentence is the reason the second airport exists and the reason the region cannot indefinitely avoid using it.

The city that owns it

A department, not an authority

The airport belongs to the City of Phoenix outright and is run as a department of it. The director reports to the city manager. The budget is a city budget. The council can be lobbied about it by anybody who lives in the city, and is.

This is about as far as it is possible to get from the capital’s arrangement, where a federal authority with a board appointed by three governments answers in practice to none of them, and where nobody has been able to establish whose airport it is.

What that buys

Responsiveness, and the ability to act.

The clearest illustration is the automated railway that runs through the field connecting the terminals to the car parks and to the city’s light rail. The city decided to build it, funded it, and built it, in a period measured in years.

The capital reserved a rail corridor to its airport in 1960, mowed the grass on it for two generations while three governments argued about who should pay, and opened a line roughly sixty years late at several times the cost of the schemes it had rejected. Phoenix’s train is not a better piece of engineering. It exists because one government owned the problem.

What it costs

Short horizons, and a proprietor who must be re-elected.

A council facing an election is a poor instrument for a decision whose benefit arrives in thirty years and whose cost arrives now, which is precisely the shape of the decision this airport’s constraint will eventually force. The federal authority in the capital is criticised for answering to nobody, and answering to nobody is what allows it to take twenty-year decisions. Phoenix’s owner cannot, and everybody in the region understands that the move to a second airport, when it comes, will be made by a council that would rather it happened after their term.

The airlines

A hub and a base on the same field

Two entirely different theories of the airline business operate here side by side, which makes Sky Harbor the best place in the Realm to watch them argue.

American Airlines runs a full connecting hub, acquired through merger and retained because the arithmetic supported it: banks of arrivals and departures, passengers sorted and sent onward, a large proportion of whom never leave the terminal.

Southwest Airlines runs one of its largest point-to-point bases from the same field, on the opposite principle: no banks, no connections sold as a product, aircraft turned fast and flown to the next city.

The two operations share runways and share almost no assumptions. One needs its aircraft to arrive together and wait; the other needs its aircraft never to wait. The airport accommodates both, which is a genuine operational achievement on three runways.

Everybody else

Pan American serves it as an ordinary trunk destination and as the western feed for its Pacific and Latin American networks. Delta and United compete on the trunk routes. Foreign carriers reach it directly, in numbers that have grown as the valley has.

It is a notably unconcentrated airport for its size. No single carrier is in a position to dictate to the city, which the city regards as one of its better circumstances and which is largely an accident of the region’s size.

What the mix produces

The absence of a dominant carrier has a consequence the city values and rarely states: fares here are lower than at comparable airports, because no single airline can hold the field.

A hub carrier at an airport it controls prices accordingly, and passengers at such airports pay a premium that is well documented and widely resented. Here the connecting hub is disciplined by a low-fare base on the same concrete, the low-fare base is disciplined by two more trunk carriers, and all of them are disciplined by the fact that Phoenix generates an enormous quantity of local traffic that will simply not fly if the fare is wrong.

It is a good outcome and it was nobody’s design. It is the product of the valley being large enough to support several operations and of the city having never been in a position to grant anybody a monopoly.

The board

The Register does not publish timetables, which change with the season and the fare war. What follows is the principal scheduled network as it stands at present: the carriers with a substantial presence, and the destinations they are known for rather than every point each one serves.

One feature is worth noticing before reading it. Las Vegas appears here as a domestic destination inside the March of Arizona, because the Las Vegas Basin is March territory, which makes one of the busiest routes on the board an internal flight between two parts of the same polity.

What the board shows

A departure board is a fair description of the economy behind it, and this one describes a regional capital rather than a world city.

The domestic list is dense, western and transcontinental, and since 2027 it reaches Loreto, which is a domestic destination because the Territory is part of the Realm. The foreign list is short: a European service, a couple into Mexico, an Albian seasonal, and one very large exception.

The Tokyo service

Pan American flies Phoenix to Tokyo, and it is the only long-haul service the field has.

It is a substantial operation, flown daily with a widebody, and it exists for reasons that were not primarily commercial. The March pressed for a direct Asian service for the better part of fifty years, on the argument that a polity of its size and growth should not have to route its trade and its people through California to reach the largest economies across the ocean. The commercial case was marginal every time it was examined. The flag carrier flew it anyway, which is what a flag carrier is for, and which is consistent with a company that also flies Alaska and the Pacific islands at a loss because its constitution requires it.

The route has since done considerably better than the forecasts, in the ordinary way of services that create the traffic they were told did not exist. The March’s electronics, aerospace and university links into Japan and the wider Pacific are now substantial enough that the service is defended on its own numbers, and the argument in Phoenix has quietly inverted. The question asked now is not whether the route is justified but why there is only one of them.

Why there is only one

Because everything else routes elsewhere, and the arithmetic that made Tokyo marginal makes a second long-haul worse.

Atlanta, Kennedy, Dallas/Fort Worth and San Francisco are where the Realm’s long-haul actually departs from, and each is a connecting machine assembling passengers for a hundred destinations at once. Phoenix assembles them for one. A traveller from the March bound for Europe, South America or most of Asia still changes aircraft, usually twice, and will go on doing so.

The Tokyo service exists because it is the flag carrier’s, because the March pressed for decades, and because the traffic eventually arrived to justify a decision taken without it. None of those conditions is easy to reproduce.

The Air Guard

The March’s air component shares the field, in an establishment that traces directly to the organisation Goldwater raised after the war. Its presence complicates the airport’s ground movements and its airspace, has been raised as an argument for relocation more than once, and has survived every one of those arguments.

Freight

The freight operation is large and is being squeezed.

A parcel earns less per acre than a passenger, and on a field with no spare acres the parcels lose. Freight facilities have been progressively displaced towards the edges and increasingly towards the eastern airport, and the general view in the industry is that cargo may be what finally makes that field work, because freight does not care how far it is from downtown.

Openness

The concourses are open, greeting at the gate is normal, and the settlement the Realm arrived at after May Day applies here exactly as it does everywhere.

It is also considerably less argued about here than in the capital, and the reason should be said plainly: Phoenix was never a plausible target, so the policy costs this airport nothing to maintain. The Realm’s most admired security decision is easiest to hold in the places where it is least tested, and an article that praised Sky Harbor for its open concourses would be praising it for a position it has never had to defend.

The second airport

The field with room

An airport exists on the eastern edge of the valley, converted from a wartime military field, with long runways, unlimited land, low charges and a small low-fare operation.

It was developed precisely because everybody involved understands that Sky Harbor is finished as a growth airport. It is the region’s answer, it is already built, and it is nearly empty.

Why nobody goes

Because three miles from downtown beats forty miles from downtown, and no airline will move traffic to an airport passengers do not want while the better one is still open.

The economics are unanswerable at the level of the individual decision and produce a collective outcome nobody wants. Every carrier would be better off if all of them moved. None will move first. The city that owns Sky Harbor has no incentive to encourage a move to a field it does not own, and the municipalities that own the eastern airport cannot compel anybody.

What the eastern field actually is

It is not a small airport. It has the runways, the land, the approaches and the climate margins that Sky Harbor lacks, and it could accommodate the whole valley’s traffic with room to spare.

What it does not have is anybody who wants to go there. It sits on the far eastern edge of a metropolitan region that is very wide, which means it is forty minutes from the centre and considerably more from the western suburbs, and its low-fare operation exists on the willingness of a particular kind of passenger to trade an hour of driving for a cheaper fare.

What might force it

Capacity is the obvious candidate and has been predicted for thirty years without arriving, because the airport keeps finding ways to handle more on the same concrete.

The heat is the newer candidate and is less tractable, because no amount of operational cleverness makes air denser. The eastern field is higher and hotter, which does not help.

The honest answer is that the move will happen when something forces it and that nobody can say what the forcing event will be, or whether it will be a gradual accumulation of restricted afternoons or a single summer in which the arithmetic stops working. The region has built the answer and cannot bring itself to use it.

The valley it serves

A region without a centre

Phoenix is not a city with suburbs. It is a very wide low metropolitan region of many municipalities, most of them of substantial size, spread across a valley in a pattern of urban villages rather than radiating from a single core.

That shape is why the airport’s position matters so much. In a conventional city, distance from the centre is a reasonable measure of convenience for most people. Here there is no single centre, and Sky Harbor’s advantage is not that it is near downtown but that it is near the geometric middle of a very large inhabited area. Almost nobody in the valley is more than forty minutes from it, which is a rarer property than it sounds and is the real reason the eastern field cannot compete.

The March’s front door

For the rest of the Realm this airport is the March.

A great deal of what people elsewhere know about Arizona is formed in the twenty minutes between an aircraft door and a hire car: the light, the heat coming off the apron, the mountains visible from the concourse windows, the particular quality of the air in June. The March understands this and the airport has been used deliberately as an instrument of the polity’s self-presentation for sixty years.

The article notes it because it is the reason the art programme exists, the reason the concourses look the way they do, and part of the reason the neighbourhood clearance has stayed out of the official history: a front door is curated.

The workforce

Tens of thousands of people work on the field, making it one of the largest concentrations of employment in the March. A minority are employed by the city; the rest work for airlines, handling agents, caterers, cleaners, security contractors and freight companies.

The structure is the same everywhere in these articles. The difference here is that the ultimate proprietor is a council, and the people working under contract on its land are also its voters, which has produced a municipal living wage requirement for airport contractors that the airlines opposed and the council carried.

The airport now

Its position

It handles more passengers than at any point in its history, on three runways it cannot add to, in a metropolitan region that is still among the fastest growing in the Realm. It is efficient, well run and popular, and its limits are now visible on a clear day.

What it does well

It is worth being specific rather than warm about this, since the article has declined the civic voice elsewhere.

The airport turns aircraft quickly, which matters enormously to a field with a large low-fare operation and no room. It moves passengers from kerb to gate faster than any comparable airport in the Realm, largely because the terminals are close to the roads and to each other and because the automated railway works. Its delay statistics are good in every month that is not July or August. It rebuilds itself without drama. And it does all of this on three runways in a metropolitan area of several million people.

None of that is luck and none of it is charm. It is the product of a constrained operator that has had to be good because it has never had the option of being large.

Whether the valley will move

The question underneath everything else is whether this region will ever use the airport it has already built, and the answer is not knowable.

What can be said is that the decision will not be made on the merits, because the merits have been clear for thirty years and nothing has happened. It will be made when the cost of staying exceeds the cost of moving, by a council that would prefer the reckoning fell after its term, in a valley that has spent a century solving physical problems by engineering and has now met one that engineering does not solve.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Phoenix - the capital of the March, and the city that owns the airport outright
• March of Arizona - the polity, and Goldwater’s Lord Marchership
• Barry Goldwater - pilot, Air Guard commander, High Steward, and the second half of the name
• Salt River Project - the water without which there is no city and therefore no airport
• George Washington International Airport - the capital’s airport, and this one’s opposite in every respect
• American Airlines - which runs the connecting hub here
• Southwest Airlines - which runs one of its largest bases from the same three runways

Categories

Land & Landscape · Aviation · March of Arizona · Phoenix