DENVER — Southwest Airlines has been gearing up to expand in a big way at Denver International Airport — and now it’s got more than a dozen new gates to pull it off.
City and airline officials cut the ribbon Thursday afternoon on the largest of several concourse expansions underway at DIA. In the next month or so, Southwest will begin using some of the 16 new gates added at the east end of Concourse C as part of an expansion that added 530,000 square feet of space, or roughly nine football fields. It’s staked a claim on all the new gates for future use.
Southwest’s 40 total gates will allow for significant new capacity in coming years, building on DIA’s status as the airline’s largest base. Its schedule out of Denver is set to increase from nearly 230 daily departures now to 250 during the summer and 274 by October, spokesman Dan Landson said, but there’s substantial potential beyond that.
