6 ms·

Seattle's new airport terminal can’t fit planes it was designed to handle

111 points by hnburnsy 4y ago

elbigbad 4y ago
This is absolutely something that they should have caught before building the terminal.
- koolba 4y ago
  In the old days where the executive who’s pet was this type of construction project, it’d have been painfully obvious in the obligatory scale model across the room. The executive would be playing “park the planes”, like a six year old plays with toys, and suddenly notice that his shiny new 787 scale model doesn’t fit at the gate.
  - fbdab103 4y ago
    If only Meta had nailed VR in time, this disaster could have been avoided.
0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
France had a similar debacle with ordering the wrong size trains [0]. Supposedly that blunder cost $20 billion. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27497727 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27497727 Edit: Apparently $20 billion was sticker price for all trains. Presumably something was worked out so they were not out the full bill.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  Because many train platforms were older and didn't leave as much room for the train. Given the cost I wonder if they could have just done remedial work on all those platforms as the trains came online. After all, track and bridge maintenance has to happen quite regularly.
  - selectodude 4y ago
    It was just the station platforms, and yeah, it turned out to be cheaper to fix the platforms.
jefftk 4y ago
Only after the facility was built did the port authority realize that widebody aircraft like the Airbus A330, Boeing 777 and 787 Dreamliner, which are regularly used on long-haul international flights, couldn’t fit into four of the gates at the facility.
- nawgz 4y ago
  Four out of 20 gates! That is ludicrously sloppy. I enjoy that their recourse for such a failure in design so far has been to "write a strongly worded letter". Is there some kind of protection for the builder that is preventing them from being sued? Is the airport body governing this actually the one that failed? What a bizarre situation
  - Flammy 4y ago
    Probably a Design-Build bid, based on how other large infra has worked here in Seattle (See: Hw 99 Tunnel). It appears the 4/20 work with smaller planes, so merely may not have been need until now. Local reporting has a few other issues mentioned about specific gates, which to me sounds like a "Our contract says you have 30 days to reply to our letter informing of issues before xyz happens". So purely posturing before mediation before lawsuits. But we'll see. For anyone interested, I found the local media coverage was higher quality: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-tac-airports-new-1b-international-terminal-too-tight-a-squeeze-for-20-big-jets/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...
  - karpierz 4y ago
    As written in the article: > ... the Port is counter-suing Clark to recoup costs involved in fixing the gate layout fiasco.
  - acomjean 4y ago
    usually design documents are stamped by a "professional engineer" (PE) licensed by the state. They're names on the documents and they're supposed to check them. I used to be a civil engineer and for the earthworks the PE always had us checking things. especially grades in the areas around the perimeter. Our initials were on it but the PE stamped it. We did catch a few things where the plans called for a "wall" because if we did our 3/1 grading we'd meet existing over the property line. Not sure how the engineering works for airports.
thelittlenag 4y ago
Measure never; build again and again and ....
stametseater 4y ago
Stuff like this used to be designed at drafting tables, by hand. Now we have computers that facilitate sophisticated modelling during every stage of the design process. So how is it even possible to fuck up this bad?
- eganist 4y ago
  Checks and balances failed. People phoned in the work. I can imagine it.
- belinder 4y ago
  When something gets easier we get sloppier
- carabiner 4y ago
  Well today we have lower iq scores.
- darth_avocado 4y ago
  Someone probably decided it was not worth it to pay for the right software that could detect it
- isaacremuant 4y ago
  Because machines are never the substitute for thinking and checking. Tools need to be used with intention and not by coincidence. Even with a simple calculator, just by getting a result after mashing buttons it doesn't mean that the result is valid for the problem you were seeking to solve. The same goes for more complex tools and new things like LLM expose the lack of critical thinking by humans even further. "The system told me so" is the laziest lack of ownership and appeal to an authority that is not only not above reproach but usually extremely buggy for different reasons.
- coliveira 4y ago
  There is no real engineering in charge of this, it's all managers making decisions and engineers are asked just to do the boring parts. How would managers know that gates need to be dimensioned for airplanes?
joncp 4y ago
So, nobody built a scale model or 3D simulation before they built it IRL? Or is the article leaving something out?
- db48x 4y ago
  Other articles are pointing out that the construction company claims that the contract specifies 16 widebody gates and 4 narrowbody gates, exactly what was delivered.
- stonogo 4y ago
  Of course they did. It's a common part of large-scale construction. You don't just model the finished product; you model the stages of construction. This is called BIM (Building Information Management), Seattle wrote BIM deliverables into the contract, and Clark used Bentley software to project-manage the construction. Bentley is using this as a PR case study: https://www.bentley.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/CS-Clark-Construction-LTR-EN-FIN-1.pdf https://www.bentley.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/CS-Clark-...
seatac76 4y ago
Would love to get more insight into what happened in the design phase? Besides the construction contractor who was the architect, why aren’t they being sued?
- chasd00 4y ago
  Was wondering the same. I worked for an architect as a CAD draftsman in college and know that what gets drawn vs what actually gets built can be two very different things. Unless the architect is at the site every other day checking things the contractor treats construction plans as a basic guide at best.
nighthawk454 4y ago
Project ran for 2x as long as planned and 3x the budget. And we're left with finger-pointing and lawsuits
cavisne 4y ago
This sort of stuff combined with the train situation really does feel like the start of an Ayn Rand novel. I will say this is a remarkably small overspend for this sort of project though "Originally earmarked to cost no more than $968 million, the Port authority was forced to pump an additional $18 million into the project in 2021, but now there are fears an additional $78 million will need to be found to address the gate layout design." Normally these projects at least double.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  What do you mean by “the train situation”? I get the subject matter connection with Rand, but I’m not seeing a connection with SeaTac which has had a light rail connection for many years now.
  - cavisne 4y ago
    I meant more broadly the train crashes in the US, although the light rail specifically has also had problems https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sound-transit-will-shell-out-millions-to-keep-pace-with-construction-delays/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sou...
hirundo 4y ago
> The Port of Seattle says it could cost as much as $78 million to fix an apparent design flaw A good detailed simulation that would have caught this would be a small fraction of that cost. Release it as part of flight sim games and let the public explore it. Offer rewards for suggestions that lead to design changes. With such an expensive risk of mistakes it should be only a matter of time before detailed explorable sims of major projects become routine.
- just_steve_h 4y ago
  Our world we be so much better if the people responsible for mega projects actually thought this way! But, I suspect that a person needs to have a certain hubris to believe themselves worthy of heading a huge project, and that this belief militates against seeking input from outsiders that might catch mistakes.
- chasd00 4y ago
  They didn’t need a detailed simulation all they needed was to import 2d dxf’s of the planes into the terminal drawing and see if they fit. I bet requirements changed and no one reviewed those last 4 gates before construction docs were printed.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  Wouldn't it have sufficed to check the planes wingspan?
- stonogo 4y ago
  They had a good detailed simulation. Any competent construction project does, and most of the time, agencies are federally mandated to require BIM both for the construction phase and the maintenance phase. No amount of detailed simulation can help if your contractor thinks you wanted 16 widebody bays and 4 narrowbody bays. There was nothing wrong with the execution; the disagreement is about what was to be built.
coliveira 4y ago
That's the reality of the US: it has lost its capacity of building anything under budget and correctly. Engineering skills have been replaced by blind management guided by computer software. This is the result.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tadfisher 4y ago
  Disagree. Engineering skills are better than they have ever been, and tools are better. What management has figured out is that governments have more to lose. Do you want a multi-year lawsuit and delay with election season coming, or do you want your bridge built eventually for just a hundred million more?
  - coliveira 4y ago
    The reasons why this is happening don't matter. It is exactly because of this line of thinking your expressed that engineering skills are going down the toilet. What matters is the result for the country, and the results are the worst possible.
wahern 4y ago
Whether those particular gates were actually designed for widebody aircraft is exactly the point of contention. Clark Construction says the design specifications for those gates were for narrowbody aircraft, and suggests that this is but one of many SeaTac flip-flops that caused tremendous cost inflation, resulting in an earlier lawsuit initiated by Clark for unpaid labor costs. Given the acrimony it would seem rather difficult to know as an onlooker what transpired and why. Seattle Times has a better article: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-tac-airports-new-1b-international-terminal-too-tight-a-squeeze-for-20-big-jets/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t... > Clark’s latest legal brief, filed in late February, asserts that the contract documents defining the work “specifically state that Clark was to design the Project to accommodate narrowbody aircraft at Gates A6 and A8, not widebody aircraft.”
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  "Given the acrimony it would seem rather difficult to know as an onlooker what transpired and why." It's very plausible that the people writing the requirements took the cheap/ignorant route and it's very plausible that Clark knew it was a mistake but it would be a worse mistake to fight.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    This seems like a common problem not just in construction but in all parts of society. It very likely that plenty of engineers looked at the design of this and said that it doesn't work this way and that they were silenced along the way. Germany built massive transit hub train terminals in a matter of a year during the Nazi period(I forgot the name, but it was a transit hub for military equipment between Hamburg and Dresden I think), while today, this story here reads exactly like Stuttgart 21, where a decade long construction projects ends up with less capacity than the previous train hub. My dad was telling me about when he learned construction where there was the same guy responsible for building the stairs and sometimes that person would diverge from the plan because his experience would tell him that the design was wrong. I managed part of a construction project when I was working in Government in Germany and many of the subcontractors told me exactly the same thing, the guys designing the network, AFA and data center access control(Bosch), as well as the network cabling, and even the carpenter and the elevator company all told me the same thing. The architect sent them wrong specs and these guys said that, were they to change any of the specs they would be liable for any upcoming issue. The elevator company was the only one that looked at the specs and told his worker to change it and then in front of me told his worker that he would take responsibility for the change. It went beyond that, because the Architecture firm running the construction project actually told these subcontractors not to send us issues that they see, so until I started actively poking around they told me that they were told not to inform us directly. For all other building services engineering parts I had to get personally involved, finding the issues, then corroborate them with a second contracting firm only to then face an uphill battle to convince leadership of the decades of upcoming problems if we don't change them. This is the same reason people hire Accenture and EY we read in the other thread. As long as leadership doesn't know they're not going to be liable for all the crap that was installed under their watch. And because the contracting firms know that they will building things EXACTLY according to spec(or this case the construction tender). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
epgui 4y ago
[flagged]
motohagiography 4y ago
Maybe it was on purpose, as by cutting the size of four gates to handle all but the largest aircraft, net-net you get a whole extra gate or two. I was about to snark about project anti-patterns and blame weak parenting for raising generations of worms, but I'd be willing to bet instead of 18 total gates, you get 20 gates by giving up some of the largest ones. Accepting the economics of maybe 10-15% of aircraft as a design constraint on all gates seems unwise, and maybe some climate people figured the same.
piotrkaminski 4y ago
> Originally earmarked to cost no more than $968 million, the Port authority was forced to pump an additional $18 million into the project in 2021, but now there are fears an additional $78 million will need to be found to address the gate layout design. Wait, they're complaining about a potential *10%* cost overrun? They should drop by California, I've got a lovely HSR system to sell them. It won't cost a dollar over $33 billion, I swear.
Johnny555 4y ago
the Port of Seattle claimed that the shortfall of available gates could cause damages “in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over the expected life of this project.” That’s a pretty big range of damages, spending $78M (which probably means $100M by the time it’s done) to fix something that could only cost $50M in lost damages over the 30 (?) year lifespan of the project doesn’t seem like a good return on investment. It’s not like the gates are completely unusable, they just need to be used by smaller planes. How much would it cost to make those 4 gates completely unusable over what is sure to be a multi year construction project?
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  It’s an international terminal, so the plane jet bridges exit out to immigration, customs. I’m not sure if they can edit out into the airport, though I suppose it is probably possible since that’s how they are loaded. If used for international flights, there are simply not many narrow body planes to consider…Canada would be the only place close by, but they mostly do US immigration/customs in Canada via special arrangement.
  - topkai22 4y ago
    737 max can do 4000+ miles in on paper. That puts all of Mexico, most of Central America, and a good chunk of the Caribbean in range I believe.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      Ya, but Seattle is still a mid sized city, I don’t think most of those routes could work profitably in narrow bodies. Alaska has only four Mexican destinations, all the other airlines probably find transfers more profitable.
      - jwestbury 4y ago
        There are more than 25 international destinations served by nonstop routes from SeaTac[0]. In my experience (more than a dozen international trips from SeaTac), the majority of international routes from SeaTac are either non-stop or transfer internationally rather than domestically -- most flights to Europe and Africa, for instance, feature a transfer at Amsterdam or Frankfurt. But, of course, those routes are generally not less than 4000 miles. SEA->LHR is one of the shorter routes to Europe, and even that is >4700 miles. 0. https://www.portseattle.org/page/non-stop-international-routes https://www.portseattle.org/page/non-stop-international-rout...
deathanatos 4y ago
> $1 Billion […] After more than 400 million labor hours Or, an average of $2.50/hr of labor? > [much later] Oregon Live reports that Clark Construction sued the Port of Seattle last December for $100 million, claiming it had been underpaid labor costs Oh, well, I suppose that checks out. … you get what you pay for, Seattle? (I do wish journalists would ask the obvious followups when presented with what is hopefully a wrong number.)
- mmoskal 4y ago
  Ironically city of Seatac was one of the first with $15/hr min wage and now has $19 - highest in the US.
- randyrand 4y ago
  that 400 million number sounded awfully high to me.
stonogo 4y ago
Interestingly, reporting at the time made no mention of adding narrow-body plane gates. Example from 2020: https://www.airlinereporter.com/2020/01/sea-tacs-international-arrivals-facility-getting-much-needed-upgrade/ https://www.airlinereporter.com/2020/01/sea-tacs-internation... "The new security corridor along the face of Concourse A will provide eight international wide-body aircraft gates with direct access to the new arrivals facility." The Port of Seattle's own deck from 2014 implies only seven: https://meetings.portseattle.org/portmeetings/attachments/2014/2014_10_28_SM_7b_Supp.pdf https://meetings.portseattle.org/portmeetings/attachments/20... (page 3) By 2018 the Port has decided eight are coming: https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/Sea-Tac_Intl_Arrivals_Fact_Sheet.pdf https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/Sea-... Maybe they opened a gate in the meantime? This 2014 article talks about an increase of nine: https://airlinegeeks.com/2014/11/16/seatac-airport/ https://airlinegeeks.com/2014/11/16/seatac-airport/ "It will also increase the number of wide-body gates from 11 to 20." So does this 2016 article: https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2016/09/29/fly-through-sea-tac-airports-international.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2016/09/29/fly-thro... "The new facility will allow airlines to add international flights to and from Sea-Tac by increasing the airport's international wide-body aircraft gates from 11 to 20..." This 2015 one sticks to the "add seven" plant: https://informedinfrastructure.com/15920/port-of-seattle-reviews-designs-for-an-expanded-international-arrivals-facility-at-seatac/ https://informedinfrastructure.com/15920/port-of-seattle-rev... "Nearly double the number of existing gates capable of serving international wide-body aircraft from 11 to 18 gates" By 2019 they're talking about adding eight, but not starting from 11: https://seattlebusinessmag.com/aerospace/more-international-flights-equals-more-congestion-delays-sea-tac/ https://seattlebusinessmag.com/aerospace/more-international-... "... a multilevel complex that will expand the number of gates at Sea-Tac that can accommodate international wide-body airplanes from 12 to 20." So I think they squeezed in a gate before construction started. It's fascinating that over the years apparently nobody knew what the hell the plan was. I guess it's no shock that the end result was surprising.
metaphor 4y ago
Clark Construction's lawsuit is Case No 22-2-20747-7 SEA filed with the King County Superior Court[1]. That being said, it never ceases to amaze me how much friction there is in attempting to access public records in our country's court systems; at least King County Superior Court uses Daily Journal tech, which isn't the grift-by-undesign dumpster fire that the Western District of Washington's PACER interface is, but you'll still need to register a username to dive deeper. [1] https://dja-prd-ecexap1.kingcounty.gov/?q=node/420/3327963/FV-Public-Case-Documents-Portal https://dja-prd-ecexap1.kingcounty.gov/?q=node/420/3327963/F...
testemailfordg2 4y ago
People at the top have a mindset to get things done first and they can ask for forgiveness later.....
teo_zero 4y ago
In my city they built an underground train station and forgot that diesel locomotives are still in service: the venting system was designed for electric trains only!

111 points by hnburnsy 4y ago

elbigbad 4y ago

This is absolutely something that they should have caught before building the terminal.

koolba 4y ago
In the old days where the executive who’s pet was this type of construction project, it’d have been painfully obvious in the obligatory scale model across the room. The executive would be playing “park the planes”, like a six year old plays with toys, and suddenly notice that his shiny new 787 scale model doesn’t fit at the gate.
- fbdab103 4y ago
  If only Meta had nailed VR in time, this disaster could have been avoided.

0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago

France had a similar debacle with ordering the wrong size trains [0]. Supposedly that blunder cost $20 billion. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27497727 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27497727 Edit: Apparently $20 billion was sticker price for all trains. Presumably something was worked out so they were not out the full bill.

jemmyw 4y ago
Because many train platforms were older and didn't leave as much room for the train. Given the cost I wonder if they could have just done remedial work on all those platforms as the trains came online. After all, track and bridge maintenance has to happen quite regularly.
- selectodude 4y ago
  It was just the station platforms, and yeah, it turned out to be cheaper to fix the platforms.

jefftk 4y ago

Only after the facility was built did the port authority realize that widebody aircraft like the Airbus A330, Boeing 777 and 787 Dreamliner, which are regularly used on long-haul international flights, couldn’t fit into four of the gates at the facility.

nawgz 4y ago
Four out of 20 gates! That is ludicrously sloppy. I enjoy that their recourse for such a failure in design so far has been to "write a strongly worded letter". Is there some kind of protection for the builder that is preventing them from being sued? Is the airport body governing this actually the one that failed? What a bizarre situation
- Flammy 4y ago
  Probably a Design-Build bid, based on how other large infra has worked here in Seattle (See: Hw 99 Tunnel). It appears the 4/20 work with smaller planes, so merely may not have been need until now. Local reporting has a few other issues mentioned about specific gates, which to me sounds like a "Our contract says you have 30 days to reply to our letter informing of issues before xyz happens". So purely posturing before mediation before lawsuits. But we'll see. For anyone interested, I found the local media coverage was higher quality: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-tac-airports-new-1b-international-terminal-too-tight-a-squeeze-for-20-big-jets/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...
- karpierz 4y ago
  As written in the article: > ... the Port is counter-suing Clark to recoup costs involved in fixing the gate layout fiasco.
- acomjean 4y ago
  usually design documents are stamped by a "professional engineer" (PE) licensed by the state. They're names on the documents and they're supposed to check them. I used to be a civil engineer and for the earthworks the PE always had us checking things. especially grades in the areas around the perimeter. Our initials were on it but the PE stamped it. We did catch a few things where the plans called for a "wall" because if we did our 3/1 grading we'd meet existing over the property line. Not sure how the engineering works for airports.

thelittlenag 4y ago

Measure never; build again and again and ....

stametseater 4y ago

Stuff like this used to be designed at drafting tables, by hand. Now we have computers that facilitate sophisticated modelling during every stage of the design process. So how is it even possible to fuck up this bad?

eganist 4y ago
Checks and balances failed. People phoned in the work. I can imagine it.
belinder 4y ago
When something gets easier we get sloppier
carabiner 4y ago
Well today we have lower iq scores.
darth_avocado 4y ago
Someone probably decided it was not worth it to pay for the right software that could detect it
isaacremuant 4y ago
Because machines are never the substitute for thinking and checking. Tools need to be used with intention and not by coincidence. Even with a simple calculator, just by getting a result after mashing buttons it doesn't mean that the result is valid for the problem you were seeking to solve. The same goes for more complex tools and new things like LLM expose the lack of critical thinking by humans even further. "The system told me so" is the laziest lack of ownership and appeal to an authority that is not only not above reproach but usually extremely buggy for different reasons.
coliveira 4y ago
There is no real engineering in charge of this, it's all managers making decisions and engineers are asked just to do the boring parts. How would managers know that gates need to be dimensioned for airplanes?

joncp 4y ago

So, nobody built a scale model or 3D simulation before they built it IRL? Or is the article leaving something out?

db48x 4y ago
Other articles are pointing out that the construction company claims that the contract specifies 16 widebody gates and 4 narrowbody gates, exactly what was delivered.
stonogo 4y ago
Of course they did. It's a common part of large-scale construction. You don't just model the finished product; you model the stages of construction. This is called BIM (Building Information Management), Seattle wrote BIM deliverables into the contract, and Clark used Bentley software to project-manage the construction. Bentley is using this as a PR case study: https://www.bentley.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/CS-Clark-Construction-LTR-EN-FIN-1.pdf https://www.bentley.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/CS-Clark-...

seatac76 4y ago

Would love to get more insight into what happened in the design phase? Besides the construction contractor who was the architect, why aren’t they being sued?

chasd00 4y ago
Was wondering the same. I worked for an architect as a CAD draftsman in college and know that what gets drawn vs what actually gets built can be two very different things. Unless the architect is at the site every other day checking things the contractor treats construction plans as a basic guide at best.

nighthawk454 4y ago

Project ran for 2x as long as planned and 3x the budget. And we're left with finger-pointing and lawsuits

cavisne 4y ago

This sort of stuff combined with the train situation really does feel like the start of an Ayn Rand novel. I will say this is a remarkably small overspend for this sort of project though "Originally earmarked to cost no more than $968 million, the Port authority was forced to pump an additional $18 million into the project in 2021, but now there are fears an additional $78 million will need to be found to address the gate layout design." Normally these projects at least double.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
What do you mean by “the train situation”? I get the subject matter connection with Rand, but I’m not seeing a connection with SeaTac which has had a light rail connection for many years now.
- cavisne 4y ago
  I meant more broadly the train crashes in the US, although the light rail specifically has also had problems https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sound-transit-will-shell-out-millions-to-keep-pace-with-construction-delays/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sou...

hirundo 4y ago

> The Port of Seattle says it could cost as much as $78 million to fix an apparent design flaw A good detailed simulation that would have caught this would be a small fraction of that cost. Release it as part of flight sim games and let the public explore it. Offer rewards for suggestions that lead to design changes. With such an expensive risk of mistakes it should be only a matter of time before detailed explorable sims of major projects become routine.

just_steve_h 4y ago
Our world we be so much better if the people responsible for mega projects actually thought this way! But, I suspect that a person needs to have a certain hubris to believe themselves worthy of heading a huge project, and that this belief militates against seeking input from outsiders that might catch mistakes.
chasd00 4y ago
They didn’t need a detailed simulation all they needed was to import 2d dxf’s of the planes into the terminal drawing and see if they fit. I bet requirements changed and no one reviewed those last 4 gates before construction docs were printed.
sidewndr46 4y ago
Wouldn't it have sufficed to check the planes wingspan?
stonogo 4y ago
They had a good detailed simulation. Any competent construction project does, and most of the time, agencies are federally mandated to require BIM both for the construction phase and the maintenance phase. No amount of detailed simulation can help if your contractor thinks you wanted 16 widebody bays and 4 narrowbody bays. There was nothing wrong with the execution; the disagreement is about what was to be built.

coliveira 4y ago

That's the reality of the US: it has lost its capacity of building anything under budget and correctly. Engineering skills have been replaced by blind management guided by computer software. This is the result.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tadfisher 4y ago
Disagree. Engineering skills are better than they have ever been, and tools are better. What management has figured out is that governments have more to lose. Do you want a multi-year lawsuit and delay with election season coming, or do you want your bridge built eventually for just a hundred million more?
- coliveira 4y ago
  The reasons why this is happening don't matter. It is exactly because of this line of thinking your expressed that engineering skills are going down the toilet. What matters is the result for the country, and the results are the worst possible.

wahern 4y ago

Whether those particular gates were actually designed for widebody aircraft is exactly the point of contention. Clark Construction says the design specifications for those gates were for narrowbody aircraft, and suggests that this is but one of many SeaTac flip-flops that caused tremendous cost inflation, resulting in an earlier lawsuit initiated by Clark for unpaid labor costs. Given the acrimony it would seem rather difficult to know as an onlooker what transpired and why. Seattle Times has a better article: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-tac-airports-new-1b-international-terminal-too-tight-a-squeeze-for-20-big-jets/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t... > Clark’s latest legal brief, filed in late February, asserts that the contract documents defining the work “specifically state that Clark was to design the Project to accommodate narrowbody aircraft at Gates A6 and A8, not widebody aircraft.”

readthenotes1 4y ago
"Given the acrimony it would seem rather difficult to know as an onlooker what transpired and why." It's very plausible that the people writing the requirements took the cheap/ignorant route and it's very plausible that Clark knew it was a mistake but it would be a worse mistake to fight.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  This seems like a common problem not just in construction but in all parts of society. It very likely that plenty of engineers looked at the design of this and said that it doesn't work this way and that they were silenced along the way. Germany built massive transit hub train terminals in a matter of a year during the Nazi period(I forgot the name, but it was a transit hub for military equipment between Hamburg and Dresden I think), while today, this story here reads exactly like Stuttgart 21, where a decade long construction projects ends up with less capacity than the previous train hub. My dad was telling me about when he learned construction where there was the same guy responsible for building the stairs and sometimes that person would diverge from the plan because his experience would tell him that the design was wrong. I managed part of a construction project when I was working in Government in Germany and many of the subcontractors told me exactly the same thing, the guys designing the network, AFA and data center access control(Bosch), as well as the network cabling, and even the carpenter and the elevator company all told me the same thing. The architect sent them wrong specs and these guys said that, were they to change any of the specs they would be liable for any upcoming issue. The elevator company was the only one that looked at the specs and told his worker to change it and then in front of me told his worker that he would take responsibility for the change. It went beyond that, because the Architecture firm running the construction project actually told these subcontractors not to send us issues that they see, so until I started actively poking around they told me that they were told not to inform us directly. For all other building services engineering parts I had to get personally involved, finding the issues, then corroborate them with a second contracting firm only to then face an uphill battle to convince leadership of the decades of upcoming problems if we don't change them. This is the same reason people hire Accenture and EY we read in the other thread. As long as leadership doesn't know they're not going to be liable for all the crap that was installed under their watch. And because the contracting firms know that they will building things EXACTLY according to spec(or this case the construction tender). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21

epgui 4y ago

[flagged]

motohagiography 4y ago

Maybe it was on purpose, as by cutting the size of four gates to handle all but the largest aircraft, net-net you get a whole extra gate or two. I was about to snark about project anti-patterns and blame weak parenting for raising generations of worms, but I'd be willing to bet instead of 18 total gates, you get 20 gates by giving up some of the largest ones. Accepting the economics of maybe 10-15% of aircraft as a design constraint on all gates seems unwise, and maybe some climate people figured the same.

piotrkaminski 4y ago

> Originally earmarked to cost no more than $968 million, the Port authority was forced to pump an additional $18 million into the project in 2021, but now there are fears an additional $78 million will need to be found to address the gate layout design. Wait, they're complaining about a potential *10%* cost overrun? They should drop by California, I've got a lovely HSR system to sell them. It won't cost a dollar over $33 billion, I swear.

Johnny555 4y ago

the Port of Seattle claimed that the shortfall of available gates could cause damages “in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over the expected life of this project.” That’s a pretty big range of damages, spending $78M (which probably means $100M by the time it’s done) to fix something that could only cost $50M in lost damages over the 30 (?) year lifespan of the project doesn’t seem like a good return on investment. It’s not like the gates are completely unusable, they just need to be used by smaller planes. How much would it cost to make those 4 gates completely unusable over what is sure to be a multi year construction project?

seanmcdirmid 4y ago
It’s an international terminal, so the plane jet bridges exit out to immigration, customs. I’m not sure if they can edit out into the airport, though I suppose it is probably possible since that’s how they are loaded. If used for international flights, there are simply not many narrow body planes to consider…Canada would be the only place close by, but they mostly do US immigration/customs in Canada via special arrangement.
- topkai22 4y ago
  737 max can do 4000+ miles in on paper. That puts all of Mexico, most of Central America, and a good chunk of the Caribbean in range I believe.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    Ya, but Seattle is still a mid sized city, I don’t think most of those routes could work profitably in narrow bodies. Alaska has only four Mexican destinations, all the other airlines probably find transfers more profitable.
    - jwestbury 4y ago
      There are more than 25 international destinations served by nonstop routes from SeaTac[0]. In my experience (more than a dozen international trips from SeaTac), the majority of international routes from SeaTac are either non-stop or transfer internationally rather than domestically -- most flights to Europe and Africa, for instance, feature a transfer at Amsterdam or Frankfurt. But, of course, those routes are generally not less than 4000 miles. SEA->LHR is one of the shorter routes to Europe, and even that is >4700 miles. 0. https://www.portseattle.org/page/non-stop-international-routes https://www.portseattle.org/page/non-stop-international-rout...

deathanatos 4y ago

> $1 Billion […] After more than 400 million labor hours Or, an average of $2.50/hr of labor? > [much later] Oregon Live reports that Clark Construction sued the Port of Seattle last December for $100 million, claiming it had been underpaid labor costs Oh, well, I suppose that checks out. … you get what you pay for, Seattle? (I do wish journalists would ask the obvious followups when presented with what is hopefully a wrong number.)

mmoskal 4y ago
Ironically city of Seatac was one of the first with $15/hr min wage and now has $19 - highest in the US.
randyrand 4y ago
that 400 million number sounded awfully high to me.

stonogo 4y ago

Interestingly, reporting at the time made no mention of adding narrow-body plane gates. Example from 2020: https://www.airlinereporter.com/2020/01/sea-tacs-international-arrivals-facility-getting-much-needed-upgrade/ https://www.airlinereporter.com/2020/01/sea-tacs-internation... "The new security corridor along the face of Concourse A will provide eight international wide-body aircraft gates with direct access to the new arrivals facility." The Port of Seattle's own deck from 2014 implies only seven: https://meetings.portseattle.org/portmeetings/attachments/2014/2014_10_28_SM_7b_Supp.pdf https://meetings.portseattle.org/portmeetings/attachments/20... (page 3) By 2018 the Port has decided eight are coming: https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/Sea-Tac_Intl_Arrivals_Fact_Sheet.pdf https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/Sea-... Maybe they opened a gate in the meantime? This 2014 article talks about an increase of nine: https://airlinegeeks.com/2014/11/16/seatac-airport/ https://airlinegeeks.com/2014/11/16/seatac-airport/ "It will also increase the number of wide-body gates from 11 to 20." So does this 2016 article: https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2016/09/29/fly-through-sea-tac-airports-international.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2016/09/29/fly-thro... "The new facility will allow airlines to add international flights to and from Sea-Tac by increasing the airport's international wide-body aircraft gates from 11 to 20..." This 2015 one sticks to the "add seven" plant: https://informedinfrastructure.com/15920/port-of-seattle-reviews-designs-for-an-expanded-international-arrivals-facility-at-seatac/ https://informedinfrastructure.com/15920/port-of-seattle-rev... "Nearly double the number of existing gates capable of serving international wide-body aircraft from 11 to 18 gates" By 2019 they're talking about adding eight, but not starting from 11: https://seattlebusinessmag.com/aerospace/more-international-flights-equals-more-congestion-delays-sea-tac/ https://seattlebusinessmag.com/aerospace/more-international-... "... a multilevel complex that will expand the number of gates at Sea-Tac that can accommodate international wide-body airplanes from 12 to 20." So I think they squeezed in a gate before construction started. It's fascinating that over the years apparently nobody knew what the hell the plan was. I guess it's no shock that the end result was surprising.

metaphor 4y ago

Clark Construction's lawsuit is Case No 22-2-20747-7 SEA filed with the King County Superior Court[1]. That being said, it never ceases to amaze me how much friction there is in attempting to access public records in our country's court systems; at least King County Superior Court uses Daily Journal tech, which isn't the grift-by-undesign dumpster fire that the Western District of Washington's PACER interface is, but you'll still need to register a username to dive deeper. [1] https://dja-prd-ecexap1.kingcounty.gov/?q=node/420/3327963/FV-Public-Case-Documents-Portal https://dja-prd-ecexap1.kingcounty.gov/?q=node/420/3327963/F...

testemailfordg2 4y ago

People at the top have a mindset to get things done first and they can ask for forgiveness later.....

teo_zero 4y ago

In my city they built an underground train station and forgot that diesel locomotives are still in service: the venting system was designed for electric trains only!