If it sounds like Wyatt has a savant level of appreciation for the nitty gritty details of the airport project, it’s because, as of 2017, he was in the hot seat to see it through. “We’re literally building on the bones of the old airport, and if that tunnel hadn’t been in place we couldn’t have gone forward.” “The staff at that time went to the FAA for $8 million and built this tunnel and buried it before serious work even began in 2011,” Wyatt says. 10 years earlier, in 2004, planners had realized that they needed to get rolling on a backbone step-the digging of the mid-concourse tunnel that would connect the terminals of the future. “I am amazed.”įor example, Wyatt points to a moment well before the official groundbreaking in 2014.
“I look at this rendering from 1996 and think about all the changes that have happened in aviation since then,” he says. On the cover is a rendering of the new airport that is essentially the same design as what was built. “There was a sustained will to take all of these small incremental steps to keep moving forward.” Wyatt is looking at the airport’s 1996 master plan on his desk as he says this. “I am in awe of the vision that was required to make this happen,” he says. Thanks to what airport executive director Bill Wyatt called “an extraordinary occasion of public works prescience,” Salt Lake is one of the few cities in the country to launch a new airport. The original SLC airport was built in the ’60s and like many (most, actually) airports around the country was well beyond its capacity and lifespan.
The shiny new airport that greeted my arrival that day, and all of us since, was decades in the making and is still in the making. (Vuja day?) Where was I? It took a disoriented second to realize the airport I had known since I took my first-ever flight way back in high school was gone and that I had indeed arrived in SLC. The first time I emerged from a jetway into the new Salt Lake International Airport, I experienced something I can only describe as backward Deja vu.
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