Manchester Airport Terminals 1 & 3 Forecourt Management

Manchester Airport is the UK’s third largest airport and almost 30 million passengers travel through the airport each year. MAG have an ambitious £1.0bn transformation plan over the ten-year period from 2017-27 which involves major changes to the Airport’s infrastructure. Bethell are one of three partners appointed onto MAG’s Civil Engineering Framework.

MAG have recognised Bethell’s strengths as being a major highway contractor and our involvement over the past three years has primarily been with contract successes on the Airport’s extensive road network. 

As part of the T1 &T3 Forecourt Reconfiguration, works comprised of major highway and public realm reconfiguration work to the arrivals and departure zones to accommodate new payment barriers for pick-up and drop-off vehicles. A highly regulated safety regime was necessary to safely deliver our work within these security zones ensuring zero impact on customer-sensitive areas with over 25,000 daily passenger arrivals and departures from these two terminals during the ‘low’ season. 

The T1 and T3 Forecourts were carried out whilst the existing drop off arrangements were maintained with no overall interruption to public and road access during the construction phases. 

Working on the Airport’s highways infrastructure is challenging as there is never a “quiet” period with the need to minimise inconvenience to the 24 hour/365 day operation. Works on Area 2 required implementing two working shifts patterns to meet the tight programme and schedule work around low load periods to reduce passenger interfaces. 

The principal quantities associated with work on Area 2 included: