Security at the terminal: first new U.S. airport built since 9/11 gets off the ground.

• Author: Jean, Grace
• Position: HOMELAND DEFENSE

The nation's first commercial airport to be built from the ground-up since the 9/11 terrorist attacks is being designed to incorporate advanced security features and technologies seamlessly into the infrastructure, according to officials developing the project.

If everything goes as planned, the new facility will replace Florida's Panama City-Bay County International Airport in late 2008.

Built in the late 1930s on 400 acres of land in the Florida panhandle, the Panama City-Bay County International Airport has run into several problems, said Randy Curtis, its executive director.

"One of the problems the airport has faced since 9/11 is trying to incorporate new security equipment that it's not really designed for," he said. "This is an opportunity to do it from the very beginning in the right sequence."

The airport's 6,300-foot runway is one of the shortest in the state. It does not meet Federal Aviation Administration standards, which require 1,000-foot safety areas at both ends of the runway. The safety area at one end of the airport's main runway measures 59 feet--shorter than the distance from a baseball pitcher's mound to home plate. Because of that limitation, the airport currently operates on a waiver from the FAA.

As the region became more urbanized and crowded in recent years, said Curtis, it became clear that the airport could not expand its facilities on the current property, he said.

Furthermore, it sits in a storm-surge zone and is vulnerable to flooding. Hurricane Katrina recently brought water onto some of the overruns while Hurricane Ivan last year flooded some of the runways. In 1996, Hurricane Opal caused flooding that damaged electrical equipment and impacted the operations of the airport.

Because of its close proximity to Tyndall Air Force Base, the airport actually shares airspace with the military, said Curtis.

Authorities originally wanted to expand the airport to mitigate some of these issues. But during talks with St. Joe Company, which owns much of the undeveloped property in Bay County, the airport authority determined that it would be cheaper to relocate the airport, versus trying to expand into a congested and constrained site, said Curtis.

The cost of the proposed project is $277 million, said Knute Ruggaard, project manager of Bechtel Infrastructure Corp., the San Francisco, Calif.-based company that is designing the airport.

St. Joe Company is donating 4,000 acres in an area northwest of the existing site for the new airport, said Jerry Ray, the company's senior vice president for corporate communications.

"We also donated 10,000 acres that will be used for conservation" because the state of Florida requires such mitigation, said Ray. "So this is an airport that environmentalists want done."

The airport will be part of a 75,000-acre, long-term land use plan--the largest in the state's history, said Ray. Building a...