Elevators on the rise at Tampa International Airport’s Airside D

Locations for the future Airside terminal’s elevators and escalators are becoming visible at Tampa International Airport.

The first vertical elements of Tampa International Airport’s future Airside D are beginning to appear this month as work crews have been assembling the building’s concrete elevator cores.

Six precast concrete cores forming shafts for 11 of Airside D’s 15 elevators – for passenger, cargo and service functions – are being put into place on the worksite, comprising some very visible and very important components of the $1.528 billion project.

These elevator cores will be the main arteries of movement between the main floor’s aircraft gates and passenger facilities, the ground-level U.S. Customs facility and the Mezzanine level that will house the Delta Sky Club and a common-use lounge.

Four more elevators will be built within the Airside’s second-floor steel framing, which is scheduled to start being erected in May.

The completed precast concrete towers range in height from 36 to 63 feet tall, with walls weighing as much as 49,000 pounds. The eight-inch-thick concrete panels that comprise the cores are made by Coreslab Structures and were cast at their facility in Tampa.

A crane lifts the panels into their positions atop existing concrete pits, where workers weld the panels to the foundations and to each other using dozens of steel clips at integrated points. Each core is then covered with a concrete cap that is secured at the top of the completed shaft, which will eventually house elevator cars and their operating machinery.

Also visible on the worksite is the beginnings of the shuttle platform supports to connect the 600,000-square-foot Airside D to TPA’s Main Terminal, as well as 310 foundation pads that will anchor support columns for the entire building. Crews last month were able to run and bury long spans of electrical & telecommunication conduits known as duct banks that will distribute the power throughout the building from what will be the Main Electric Room.

TPA broke ground on Airside D in December 2024, with construction scheduled to be completed by 2028 and be open to the public in 2029. The design-build team for the project is led by construction company Hensel Phelps, with Architecture and Engineering company HNTB Corporation, in association with Gensler.

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