Sizing of Departure Lounges in Airport Buildings

The introduction of large airplanes capable of carrying several hundreds of passengers will create new space requirements at airports. Space for departure lounges and into airplanes, boarding times, needed lounge capacities, and numbers of airplane entry doors are the subject of this paper. Two analytical models derived from data at the San Francisco International Airport are developed and applied to various sizes of airplanes. One model describes the flow to the departure lounge; the other describes the flow from the lounge into the airplane. Based on these models, the relationships between loading time and space required for departure lounges and the number of entry doors needed into various sizes of airplanes are determined. The methodology developed in this study is applicable to other airports.