Vought Airtrans

Vought Airtrans

Vought Airtrans passenger vehicle in operation at DFW International Airport
Overview
Locale	Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, Texas
Transit type	People mover
Number of stations	33
Daily ridership	250 million over lifetime
Operation
Began operation	January, 1974
Operator(s)	Dallas/Fort Worth Airport
Number of vehicles	68
Train length	21 feet per vehicle
Headway	165 feet
Technical
System length	15 mi (24.14 km)
Top speed	17mph

LTV's (Vought) Airtrans was an automated people mover system that operated at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport between 1974 and 2005. The adaptable people mover was utilized for several separate systems: the Airport Train, Employee Train, American Airlines TrAAin and utility service. All systems utilized the same guideways and vehicle base but served different stations to create various routes.

After 30 years of service the system's 1970s technology was no longer adequate for the expanding airport's needs, and in 2005 it was replaced by the current Skylink system. While most of the system was auctioned and sold for scrap, some guideways and stations (some of which are still open to the public) remain. Airtrans moved nearly 5 million people in its first year of operation; by the end of its life it had served over 250 million passengers.

As the first US installation of a fully automated transit system, Airtrans technology was expected to be deployed in similar mass transit systems around the country. In Japan, the system was licensed by a consortium formed between Niigata Engineering and Sumitomo Corporation for similar deployments there. However, no further systems were constructed. Car #25 was donated to the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas, Texas, and Cars #30 and #82 were donated to North Texas Historic Transportation in Fort Worth, Texas.

During the early 1960s there was growing concern in the United States about the effects of urban sprawl and the resulting urban decay that followed. Major cities across the country were watching their downtown cores turn into ghost towns as the suburbs expanded and caused a flight of capital out of the cities. The only cities that were combatting this were the ones with effective mass transit systems, cities like New York City and Boston, where the utility of the subway was greater than a car. However, these solutions were extremely expensive to develop, well beyond the budgets of smaller cities or the suburbs of larger ones. Through the 1960s there was a growing movement in urban planning circles that the solution was the personal rapid transit system, small automated vehicles that were much less expensive to develop.