RDU airport opens a new parking lot, but this one’s not for you or your car
Finding a place to park at Raleigh-Durham International Airport can be tough at times, and that goes for airlines that keep their planes there overnight.
As travelers know, early mornings are the busiest time of the day at RDU, where about a third of all daily departures take off by 8 a.m. The planes for nearly all of those flights spend the night at the airport, so they’re cleaned, fueled and ready to go.
But there’s not enough gates at the terminals for all those planes, and airlines have had to park some of them in various places around the airfield.
So RDU has built a special parking lot for planes, which it calls the West Remain Overnight or RON apron. Just north of the main terminal, near the Observation Park, the West RON has room for at least eight planes, which can quickly be towed to gates as they come open in the morning.
The RDU Airport Authority and other local leaders marked the opening of the West RON with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Monday afternoon.
“Prior to this construction, we had planes parked on ramps all over the airport, creating a logistical challenge for our airline partners during the morning rush,” said Michael Landguth, RDU’s president and CEO. “The new West RON is more convenient to Terminal 2, which gives our airline partners a shorter distance to move aircraft in position when gates become available.”
The 558,000-square-foot lot cost about $37 million, which included moving a sewage pump station and putting down pavement thick enough to handle the weight of a Boeing 777, the largest plane to regularly call on RDU.
The money came from the General Assembly through the state’s Airport Aid Program.
In addition to the new lot, RDU has 20 other designated spots for overnight parking scattered around the airfield and will continue to use those as necessary.
RDU doesn’t charge airlines for overnight parking, because it doesn’t want to discourage them from having their planes on hand for those morning departures. On any given day, about 50 flights are scheduled to take off by 8 a.m., while only a handful of incoming flights arrive during that time.
This story was originally published April 17, 2023 at 6:30 AM.
