Advertisement

MISSISSAUGA -- It's by far the biggest construction venture ever undertaken in Canada -- a huge $4.4-billion, 10-year megaproject that will transform Toronto's Lester B. Pearson International Airport by the time it is finished in 2008.

There were 1,400 construction workers inside the new terminal last week and hundreds more outside. Over the past four years, they have poured more than 3.6 million cubic feet of concrete, enough to build 2½ CN Towers. They have used enough steel to erect four Eiffel Towers. And they are less than half done.

"It's one really big jigsaw puzzle," said airport spokesman Peter Gregg, as he pointed to a spaghetti plate of new access roads squiggling across the landscape behind the new terminal. The joint contractors are PCL Constructors Inc. of Edmonton and Aecon Group Inc. of Toronto.

"We're building an entirely new airport on top of the old one," he added, referring to a project he said was the biggest ever in Canada. "We're doing it without disrupting traffic. And we're on time and under budget."

The Greater Toronto Airports Authority embarked on its reconstruction project four years ago for one simple reason. The number of airline passengers has been growing too quickly for the current airport to possibly keep up.

Pearson's three existing terminals reached their stated capacity in 1996, and a series of stop-gap add-ons, temporary buildings and upgrades have done little more than irritate passengers.

Few people realize just how busy Pearson has become in recent years. Nearly 30 million people and 392,000 tonnes of cargo passed through the airport in 2000, in 425,600 takeoffs and landings with 69 airlines. That makes it by far the busiest airport in Canada, the seventh busiest in North America and the 26th busiest in the world. More than half of all the airline passengers in Canada pass through Pearson.

And it just keeps on growing. By the time it is finished in 2008, the new Pearson will be capable of handling 50 million passengers a year, a level the airport is expected to reach by 2020. And then, they'll have to start building all over again.

It was clear by the late 1990s that a new airport was needed at Pearson. By that time, it was a hodgepodge of overcrowded buildings and parking lots that was becoming more dysfunctional by the day.

After all, Pearson's Terminal 1 -- the centrepiece of the current airport -- was designed in the days when ocean liners still ruled the seas, before the Boeing 707 opened up the world to frequent fliers, their families and economy-class backpackers. And it opened 10 years before jumbo jets arrived on the scene.

Terminal 1 will soon be torn down. Hailed as one of the most advanced airport terminals in the world when it opened in 1964, the so-called aeroquay was the height of convenience for travellers. To cut the walking distance to the airplanes outside, it was built in the round with ticket agents at the centre, aircraft around the circumference and six floors of parking stacked above, a quick elevator ride away.

It was "an architectural marvel," Mr. Gregg said. "But it has outlived its usefulness." But he noted that usefulness lasted nearly 40 years.

The death knell for Terminal 1 came in the 1980s, when security-conscious officials erected barriers throughout the airport, destroying the flow of people around the circumference, and the beauty and functionality of the building.

The much-maligned Terminal 2 is also coming down. It is functional, but it is in the way of expansion. Built as a cargo terminal in 1972, the building was hardly pretty. One architecture wag described its style as "Early Brutal," but it did have two advantages. It was as solid as the massive poured concrete that was exposed throughout and it was designed as an expandable tube.

Terminal 3, opened in 1991, was the most problematic for the designers of the new airport. It is relatively new, efficient and liked by airlines and passengers. But it just didn't fit into the grand scheme. Eventually, the airport authority decided to expand Terminal 3 temporarily and then tear it down in the third stage of the redevelopment scheme, after 2005.

The construction crews have been working for only four years of the 10-year building plan, but they have already transformed the look of the airport.

Orderly chaos surrounds the airport as it approaches the end of the first phase of construction in late 2003.

Mobile cranes and dump trucks roar as they bounce across the uneven earth. Metal forms sit in piles ready for use on the next bridge. And hundreds of helmeted workers scurry to and fro, bending iron rebar or pouring concrete, carrying shovels or trowels, depending on their job.

Many buildings have already been razed -- the giant Wardair/Canadian Airlines hangar at the south end of the airport has disappeared, and so have the old administration building and the private terminal where publisher Conrad Black used to keep his Gulfstream executive jet.

The workers have built two new runways, each three kilometres long and 130 centimetres deep. They have poured a new apron, 50 centimetres deep, where the aircraft can dock. And they have almost finished the biggest, most-modern parking lot in North America, capable of holding 12,600 cars in eight storeys.

They've laid 27 kilometres of access roads and built 47 bridges. The GTAA has even bought 1.5 kilometres of an expressway, Highway 409, and spent $80-million to bring it up to its standards.

A new crop of buildings has appeared at Pearson over the past few years. A new head office for the GTAA sits on the site of the Wardair hangar and nearby is a new multistorey police station and fire hall.

Two new control towers arise from the airport like giant space-age grain elevators. There is a new cargo terminal, a new maintenance shop big enough for three jumbo jets, a concrete manufacturing plant and a private sewage plant to make sure runoff from the runways doesn't get into municipal sewers.

There's even a temporary airline terminal between the two north-south runways that will be used for overflow traffic when the real chaos hits, when Terminals 2 and 3 start to come down.

"It has more capacity than Calgary airport," Mr. Gregg said, pointing to the terminal.

Parts of the new $3.3-billion terminal building sit squeezed between the old terminals with new access pods that jut out. They have been squished between the existing buildings and sliced off to fit, ready for completion when space allows.

At four million square feet, the new terminal is so big it dwarfs all the others. A huge semicircle, it will have glass walls along one side to let in the light with convenient moving walkways to carry people to and from the parking lot. There will be a shopping mall catering to 50 million high-income passengers a year.

Passengers will walk from the ticket agents in the main terminal building through security and into a series of scallop shells, tubes and so-called hammerheads that will take them to the waiting aircraft.

And underneath, their baggage will move along 15 kilometres of conveyor belts from plane to arrivals lounge as fast as the passengers can walk.

But the airport won't end at the terminal door. The airport is so big that the GTAA is building a light-rail transit system to carry passengers from one terminal to another, and to a possible rail head that may eventually connect to downtown Toronto 25 kilometres away.