Southwest's Growth Fuels Musical Gates at DIA

Still-healthy Southwest Airlines' growth in Denver requires more gates

Southwest Airlines, a tenant at Denver International Airport's C Concourse (now renamed "C Gates"), currently has 84 daily departures (and a comparable number of arrivals, of course), with 95 by September and 115 planned by November 2. To say that Southwest is bursting at its C Gate seams is no exaggeration.

To accommodate this growth and give Southwest more contiguous, DIA is asking Alaska Airlines, US Airways, AirTran Airways and Midwest Airlines to move. Alaska and AirTran are expected to move from their current C Gates to A Gates. Air Tran and Midwest will share an A Gate to which the latter has already moved. US Airways' move will be shorter, from C32 to C29.
It will be a win-win relocation, with Southwest getting the space it needs in the upcoming months, and Alaska, Air Tran and Midwest passengers departing from a closer-to-the-terminal concourse.

When I flew Southwest last month, it looked as if a moving walkway was being installed on C, the shortest of the concourses where passengers were previously required to walk to all the gates. What I think is a new walkway seems to be a substitute for the planned 10-gate expansion of C, put on hold because of the present pullback of United, Frontier and other airlines using DIA.