The new airport chief wants you to have to spend less time at the airport

Smith came to Atlanta from his hometown of Baltimore, where he ran the Maryland Aviation Administration and Baltimore/Washington International Airport. “That was going to be my last airport,” he said.

But after the search firm trying to fill the vacancy at Atlanta’s airport asked Smith to advise them, Mayor Andre Dickens ended up offering Smith the job.

After three months of a listening tour, Smith said what he has come to realize is that while Atlanta often hangs its hat on superlatives as the “busiest” and “most efficient” airport, that sometimes feels more true for its airlines than its passengers.

“I think we still have to make the case that it is the most efficient terminal in the world,” he said.

“When you’re standing in lines for food and retail shops, it doesn’t feel like the most efficient. The restrooms, they don’t feel like the most efficient.”

Passengers want to move through the airport, he said.

“Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I want to go spend my day at Hartsfield-Jackson.’ People want to fly.”

Credit: Zaire Breedlove / AJC

Credit: Zaire Breedlove / AJC

Smith said he’s looking at ways “to reduce the amount of time that people have to spend in the airport, in places like security checkpoints, restrooms, baggage claim.”

Of course, he qualified, the airport is happy for people to spend time and money at restaurants, shops and parking spots.

But he said he’s tasked his team with putting together a new strategic plan by the end of the year to assess how the airport can improve its customer experience — and ensure that its systems and buildings can handle the passenger growth to come.

Credit: John Spink

Credit: John Spink

Atlanta’s security checkpoints just this year have seen multiple instances of weather and sporting events cause cascading, multi-hour-long lines.

Smith said his team knows security is a pain point, and they’re doing a complete study of how to improve it, in coordination with the Transportation Security Administration.

“We need to take a hard look at how we do security checkpoint screening, and I think everything needs to be on the table,” he said.

While TSA continues to experiment with faster screening processes using technology like facial recognition — and ATL will certainly be involved — Smith said the airport needs to look beyond the federal government as well.

The airport will also consider private sector security partnerships, as federal funding likely won’t cover the technology and staffing needed to handle more passengers.

CLEAR is only one such company, he pointed out, and the airport needs to “find ‘new age’ approaches” to the issue.

Regarding another common Atlanta pain point, its outdated restrooms, Smith said he’s already made some changes.

Some of ATL’s restroom designs date to 1980, and the airport has already begun an extensive six-year restroom renovation of most of them.

But Smith said he has pushed to change the designs for Concourse D’s expansion restrooms — under construction now — that will be a model for the rest.

(Smith noted he has experience in this: BWI’s renovated restrooms won national accolades.)

“If you don’t get your restrooms right, people get upset,” he said.

Ultimately, Smith’s new strategic plan will look holistically across the airport and revisit its master plan of needed future construction, he said. “I don’t like to do things piecemeal. The airport is so interconnected, it’s so interdependent, that you have to step back.”

The decisions they make can’t just be for today’s nearly 110 million annual passengers but for the up to 140 million passengers that it may someday host.

“You have to make decisions today with that in mind,” he said.