5 new – and closer – gates open at Salt Lake City Int’l Airport as expansion project continues

SALT LAKE CITY — Some travelers passing through the Salt Lake City International Airport will have a shorter walk to their flights as five new gates opened in Concourse A-east Tuesday morning.

The new gates are the first piece of Phase 2 of the airport’s expansion project. Later this year, 17 additional gates and 19 new restaurants and shops will open their doors.

“Everybody is used to coming into the airport and taking a hard left to get to the gate. Now, we’ve opened the right-hand turn,” Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said.

Mendenhall, airport director Bill Wyatt and Delta Air Lines officials gathered early Tuesday to move aside a 45-foot-wide, 14-foot-tall curtain to reveal a portion of the new facility. They later cut a ribbon to ceremoniously open the facility before the first flight departed out of gate A-29 — a Delta plane heading to Atlanta.

First flight headed out on time at 7:05 this am @slcairport!

This is part of a bigger expansion project that started in 2020 and will carry through this year into next. @KSL5TV pic.twitter.com/dldan4RpkO

— Karah Brackin (@kbontv) May 16, 2023

“These five gates mean about 2,500 more customers per day are on the A concourse,” said Adam Ryan, managing director of Delta’s Salt Lake City relations. And with four more gates opening on Aug. 22 and the rest of Concourse A opening on Oct. 31, fewer passengers will have to make the “dreaded” walk to Concourse B or deplane and board a bus to reach the main terminal.

“These gates will help make actually thousands of fewer passengers have to use the hard standout on the tarmac every single day,” Mendenhall said.

“That starts to go away today, slowly, and by Oct. 31, it’ll be gone altogether,” Wyatt added. “And then (in) October 2024, that central tunnel opens, so you no longer have to walk a quarter-mile down the A concourse to get to B. You just go straight ahead.”

The airport’s first phase opened back in 2020, and crews demolished the original airport before beginning the final work on Concourse A.

“It’s a little like changing the tires on a school bus when you’re going down the freeway,” Wyatt said. “You have to keep everything open.”

The first flight out of the new gate is to Atlanta leaving the @slcairport #KSLTV pic.twitter.com/uQvVO6Ib0p

— Derek Petersen (@Derek_Photog) May 16, 2023

“To be here today took a lot of demolition work, a lot of steel, and a lot of paving,” Wyatt added.

Once complete, Holder-Big-D construction crews will have used 9,625 tons of steel, more than 250,000 cubic yards of concrete, 200 tons of ductwork, 426.2 miles of electrical wiring, 101.6 miles of communications wiring and 65.7 miles of mechanical piping to complete the second phase of the new airport, according to airport officials.

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Contributing: Carter Williams, Josh Ellis and Adam Small