Ramstad: Best kludge of the year goes to the MSP jetbridges

Attentive passengers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for most of this year could spot an unusual sight along the west side of Terminal 1.

Two jet-bridges — stretched to nearly full-length — were connected to each other rather than reaching out to airplanes.

They served as a temporary hallway from a far-off gate to the border entry hall for arriving passengers on some of Delta's international flights.

What a great kludge, I thought when I first saw it.

A kludge is typically a quick-and-dirty workaround to a problem, like running an extension cord from another room when a socket won't work or wrapping duct tape around basically anything.

Kludges tend to look messy or inelegant and yet in practice can be quite elegant. They're everywhere, though people don't easily acknowledge them. The airport's leaders did.

"Definitely," said Puneet Vedi, director of airport development and project delivery at the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which runs MSP. "That's a very fair way of explaining it."

This kludge came about because of one person's bright idea last spring when the airport was juggling construction projects with the imperatives of airline schedules and border security.

"The old cliché out here is construction at the airport is like changing a tire but you don't get to pull over the car," said Rick Valentino, MSP's facilities manager and the person with the bright idea.

Five years ago, airport officials began talking with Delta Air Lines, which occupies 80% of the gates in Terminal 1, about how to update Concourse G, the long concourse on the west side.

Northwest Airlines built the original six gates of the concourse in 1972, then extended it with a series of four pods that were built through the 1980s and connected by a long hallway. That design allowed gate openings on three sides of each pod, which worked well for the DC-9 aircraft that were at the heart of the Northwest fleet.

Delta, which bought Northwest in 2008, mainly flies bigger planes at MSP. The pods for years have had very long jet bridges because big planes park farther away. The entire airport will undergo $6 billion of construction over the next 16 years or so, with much of the work in Terminal 1 aimed at handling bigger aircraft.

To prepare for that, crews renovated some of the ramp area outside Concourse G this summer, knocking out several gates from service, including one Delta counted on for international arrivals. That gate let passengers walk directly into a secure hallway that led to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection area.

Early this year, staffers from various airport departments met to figure out how to configure another G gate to direct passengers securely into border entry. They had photos and diagrams of the terminal up on the wall. Any internal solution would consume space of that long, relatively narrow hallway that connects the pods.

Valentino noticed that gates G10 and G11, which border the gap between two pods, were closed by the concrete apron construction. He suggested connecting their jet-bridges and then using gate G13 as a new international arrival gate.

"It wasn't anything earth-shattering or anything," Valentino said. "Half the time, I just blurt stuff out. This one stuck."

Very quickly, the airport's safety and fire teams were brought in for their opinions. One sunny day in May, the jet-bridges were put in position. Steel plating was put down on the gap, and a waterproof seal wrapped around it. New exit stairs were installed at the request of the airport's fire department.

"Everybody started running with it," Valentino said. "People way smarter than me took over and started to look at it closely and pretty soon it's a reality."

Vedi said that as soon as he heard about the idea he knew it would save time and money.

"We did not have to do material construction to create a temporary link from G13 over to the international area," Vedi said. "Just the sustainability savings was very crucial."

Beginning on June 1, G13 became one of six gates that Delta uses for international arrivals. The walk was long, but no worse than Delta customers experience in Detroit and some other airports around the world.

After the apron (the pavement where airplanes park) was resurfaced, the gates in the main pod of Concourse G reopened, and G13 was no longer needed for international arrivals.

The kludge will come back, though. That's because Gate G6, one of the main international gates, will be taken out of service for part of 2024. Right now, jet-bridges are being replaced on several G gates, including G10 and G11. This spring, they will be reconnected so that G13 can substitute for G6.

"I think it's going to be out for a little bit more than the first connection," Vedi said.