Airport: Depart domestic, Return international terminal. Where to park?

[cwkimbro]

Originally Posted by billl

That's not really an option. You can't have unsecured passengers traveling through the secure area even if they are on a train that doesn't open its doors. Doors can still be forced. Also, there is no place on either end for them to enter or leave the train (you can't use the escalators and platforms that are already there). The only way to provide this would have been to build a separate underground train system, and that would have been prohibitively expensive.

Sure, it can be.

I just simply disagree. It shows a lack of ingenuity or imagination for what engineers are capable of.

The train tunnel and the train cars themselves become sterile and non-sterile.

If someone is/can force the train doors open in any scenario, whether all sterile or not, there is a huge security/safety issue. period. In any unlikely event that happens, it is too easy to monitor and control those occurrences through closed-circuit television system and hiring TSA guards, like the ones that sit around at entries and various spots throughout airports.

And yes, you're right there is no place for those people to load/unload. That would be why I expressed my original displeasure that was not built! My previous statement: "I always wished they built an extra plane train station in both terminals on the unsecured side"

Things like this also are not entirely new either. There are some airports, particularly in Europe with their expansive customs procedures, where arriving and departing passengers are kept separated, but use the same APM to travel to a central terminal with customs and sometimes additional security screening (depending on origin and destination).

Typically, it is a double sided station. The doors are opened on one side, everyone is forced to disboard, a security/customs agent searches the train was emptied, those doors close, doors on the other side open, then people going the other way board.

We don't even need that. We just need to monitor that those train cars never stop at a station in a concourse, which is easy to program into an APM system and relatively cheap to monitor.

[-thomass]

just park at the international terminal. you can check in at the international terminal for domestic flights and skip the huge security lines at the domestic terminal (our little secret).