After months of protests and legal challenges, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International’s (ATL) new 1.2M square foot international terminal finally opened May 16, exactly the day officials announced the terminal would open.
The terminal, named the Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal after the city’s first African-American mayor, is expected to meet ATL’s growing international traffic. The airport hosted nearly 10M international passengers in 2011, and the Federal Aviation Administration is forecasting that traffic to increase more than 30 percent by the year 2015.
“The Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal is America’s new global gateway,” said Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. “This magnificent facility is an economic catalyst for the city of Atlanta, the state of Georgia and the entire southeastern United States, and it will help create jobs and new business opportunities for years to come.”
The first plane to depart from the facility was a Delta Air Lines Flight to Tokyo, Japan while a Delta Air Lines flight from Dublin, Ireland was the first to arrive.
Though the official opening was May 16, festivities celebrating the terminal’s opening had begun as early as May 3 when 1,100 local government officials, business leaders and relatives of the late Maynard H. Jackson toured the facility, participated in a ribbon cutting ceremony, and unveiled a portrait of the late Mayor. In the following days airport employees were also able to experience first hand the fruits of their labor in addition to an open house that attracted 3,000 stakeholders and members of the community.
