I got the chance earlier this week to speak with some people working on the Terminal 1 replacement at Lindbergh Field and figured you all might be interested in a little bit of behind the scenes info. First off, the design of the terminal is going to look a bit different than the concepts circulated a few years back. For reference, that would be this:
Source: San Diego International Airport via The San Diego Business Journal
Apparently this design, which was done up by the airport internally, was pegged by the contractors and engineers that were actually hired to build it as being far more expensive than the airport's estimation. This was a major problem as the airport was already struggling to raise enough funds for its own lower cost estimate, and eventually the project had to be cut down and sectioned off. I had a chance to see some of the preliminary engineering documents, which I cannot post here, but upon doing a bit of google searching I managed to find a publicly available image reasonably close to what I saw:
Source: Talk given to local Rotarian group via The La Jolla Light
Important things to note are: the retention of Terminal 2 west and the deletion of both the central widebody gates and centralized customs inspection area (FIS). None of this is recent news actually, the realization that the airport's original plan was infeasible came over 2 years ago. This lead to design and construction of the recently opened FIS to keep up with demand, which at 2 years from inception to opening was built extremely quickly for an airport project.
More currently, the EIR for the relocation of the airline cargo and maintenance facilities should be approved in the fairly near future. They're currently located just to the east of the terminals, in the way of the expansion, and need to be moved. The new cargo facilities will be replace the long term parking lot north of harbor dr, the maintenance area will replace the economy parking south of PCH (these cargo areas are apparently separate from the FedEx station right next to the tower, which is going to stay). The airport noted the loss of parking, which is why they just built the new parking structure south of Terminal 2, and they included a parking structure just south of the new Terminal 1 in the design. The current estimates are something like 2 years for the relocations, the construction of the actual terminal will begin around 2020-2021 and open about 5 years later. As always though, take construction schedules with a strong grain of salt. The airport is still contemplating replacing Terminal 2 west sometime after that as well, possibly by extending the new Terminal 1 to the NW similar to the original design.
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