Europe's front door: Madrid bolsters its position as the portal between the Old World and Latin America.

AUS$6 billion investment soon will turn Madrid's airport into the largest in Europe. Getting the airport ready to handle up to 70 million passengers per year--almost double its current capacity--is part of a strategic expansion plan whose fundamental aim is to transform Madrid Barajas Airport into a hub joining Europe and Latin America.

After six years of construction, the airport's fourth terminal, known as Barajas, should be inaugurated in early 2006. The new terminal will function as a distribution center for international air traffic, with 120 take-offs and landings per hour; current capacity limits the total to 78 per hour. "We expect our airport to grow at a faster pace than the airports of London, Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam, which currently exceed the traffic of Barajas," says Jose Manuel Hesse Martin, the project's director.

The fifth-largest of European airports in terms of operating capacity, Barajas handles a quarter of direct flights to Latin America, leading Europe, even before its newest operations open for business, hardly a suprise considering the comfort many Latin Americans feel landing in a country where they already speak the language.

Currently, Barajas handles nearly half the flights to Colombia, 39% of the flights to Argentina, almost a quarter of Brazilian flights and 21% of those to Venezuela. The expectation of the airport's director, Miguel Angel Oleaga Zufiria, is to surpass these numbers when construction is finished. The project, designed by the renowned British architect Richard Rogers, involves the construction of the fourth terminal, two new runways and a satellite building.

Beyond the physical increase in the airport's size, to 3,900 hectares from 2,400, the plan is to better attend to the needs of users and reduce waiting times for travelers, taking into account that the typical Barajas passenger is an executive between the ages of 30 and 49 racing to beat the clock. "In the new terminal we will have a business center dedicated especially to executives," says Oleaga.

Two new runways will be built with a system of independent beacons, which will permit simultaneous take-offs and landings even in low visibility. "Barajas will be among the airports with the most modern facilities in Europe. And the new distribution of the terminals, in accordance with the alliances between airlines, is going to make operations more agile and reduce connecting time between flights," says Oleaga.

It was the tremendous size of the renovated Barajas that led the government regulatory body, Aeropuertos Espanoles y Navegacion Aerea, to designate each of the four terminals to airlines that do business together, usually through alliances. "It was a logical division, like those that occur in other countries," says Andoni Nieto, president of Spain's airline pilots' union.

Although the airport offers bus service to transfer passengers between terminals in less than 15 minutes, airport directors expect travelers who need to make connections to buy tickets from airlines in the same alliance. That way, travelers could avoid having to move from terminal to terminal. "It's going to be complicated, for example, to come from Brazil on Varig and then continue the trip from Madrid on Air Europa, because it will be necessary to change terminals. You have the same problem at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York," says Nieto. To make transporting passengers even easier, travelers will be moved from the facilities in the fourth terminal--where they go through check-in, security, baggage drop-off, and customs--to the new satellite building, where boarding, deplaning and passport inspection takes place, as well as shopping. Six trains will make the trip in three minutes each.

The fourth terminal, at almost 500,000 square meters, will handle more than 35 million people each year. It will be home to Spain's Iberia and other companies from the Oneworld alliance, which includes American Airlines and British Airways, among others, and is responsible for 60% of the passenger traffic in the airport. "I believe Barajas will become the best hub for flying from Europe to South America. Geographically, Spain is in the south of the Old Continent and it would be logical for Madrid to take on the same role as American airports in Miami or Atlanta, which concentrate on southbound traffic," says Nieto.

Connection. Currently, 54% of the travelers that pass through Barajas are Iberia passengers. Potential hub flyers are those who use the airport to make connections, a market Iberia already dominates: 90% of the passengers making connections in Madrid fly with the Spanish airline. "Iberia is the only company with the capacity to transform the Barajas airport into a hub," says Francisco Mochon Morcillo, a professor of economic analysis at the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia.

Iberia operates 110 weekly round-trip routes to Latin America. From Barajas, Iberia offers non-stop flights to all South American countries except Bolivia and Paraguay. "The passenger traffic between Europe and South America grew more than 14% in 2004 and to Central America, where we fly non-stop to Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, it grew 7%. Those are the destinations that grew most from Europe," says Jose Bolorinos, Iberia's director of development.

Bolorinos says that currently Iberia transports 17% of all passengers flying between Europe and Latin America: "One in every four passengers that flies Iberia to Latin America arrives from another European country and makes a connection in Barajas."