No.
When I saw this article posed by Fox 5 Atlanta, my actual reaction was haha no, but I thought it would look funnier to just say no without the narrative laughter to put emphasize on how silly of a clown question such a notion was.
What the City of Atlanta does need is for its existing airport to get their shit together and not suck as much as it does on the regular. For years, I’ve been saying that them claiming to be the busiest airport in the world isn’t something they should be proud of, because in their case, their amount of busy is completely the result of the gargantuan amount of inefficiencies they have in just about every process they have in every square inch of the property.
I’ve been to quite a number of America’s airports, and without question, the logistical nightmare that is the parking and dropoff sections of Atlanta Latoya Jackson Intergalactic Nail Salon and Hot Wing Emporium is without argument the worst in the country. Just about every airport built by people with brains uses bridges and/or multiple levels to circumvent the need for human beings to intersect with cars on the same plane, but not ATL, which still has a billion people crossing roads directed by rent-a-cops who don’t know how to do their jobs, perpetuating a cycle of failure that leads to car buildup which leads to traveler anxiety, which leads to unhinged people meeting motor vehicles, going into an airport, which are already the most stressful places in the world.
Once inside, if you’re not flying Delta, you’re most likely going to be waiting in a massive carrier line if you didn’t pre-check in to a flight and/or have actual luggage. And even if you are flying Delta, you’re most likely going to be waiting in a massive carrier line, because every single person who works for every airline and works at ATL, is a miserable power-tripping fuck whom you either get stellar customer service, provided you’re not mouthing off to Your Grace, or you get treated like an asshole, regardless if you’re not mouthing off to Your Grace. There is no rhyme or reason to it.
Next, worse than a Wal-Mart, they have like 30 TSA checkpoint gates, but at any given time whether it’s the day before Thanksgiving or some rando-Tuesday afternoon, only four of them will actually be open, and at no point of existence does the airport not play down to their competition (travelers) and manage to be in a state of needing four hours advance time in order to make a flight on time.
Once you get past security, if you’re not flying out of the T gates, you’re going to need to ride the Plane Pain Train to get to your appropriate terminal. There used to be trains every 90 seconds, but COVID gave them all the excuse in the world to slash their train operators and run a train every three minutes now, so it’s basically a guarantee that you will board a train almost as full as a Japanese commuter, where nobody gives a fuck if you’re elderly, pregnant or handicapped, you get on by any means necessary, or else you walk to each terminal individually a quarter mile apart.
So now you get to your terminal. Smart travelers usually utilize this time, if they have any, to make sure to take care of things like bathroom needs and/or food before hopping onto a flight, because neither is a guarantee once in the air. If you arrive to ATL for a 5-7 am flight, nothing is going to be open. If you arrive at 8, you’ll be privileged to watch the morning crew blissfully and deliberately ignore you until 9 am while they blab and socialize instead of possibly opening up and start making money.
And then they’ll work at a snail’s pace the entire day because honestly, it doesn’t matter how hard they work, the line will be wall-to-wall, so they’re never going to give beyond the bare minimum effort. And then by 6 pm, they’ll claim to be out of food for the day, close up shop and be out the door by 7, leaving the only options left usually being the McDonald’s, Qdoba and Panda Express in the E gates, or people ransack the closest Hudson News of anything edible.
Oh and the bathrooms? Much like the rest of the airport, ATL’s restrooms are most definitely the busiest bathrooms on the planet, and at no point on any day will you ever walk into a restroom and not find every single urinal and stall in use, and the appropriate response is to just hunker down and wait, because there’s absolutely no guarantee it won’t be the exact same result at the next one.
I hope you like your toilet seats pre-warmed by some other person’s ass.
Finally, you arrive at your gate, which will usually be completely packed by the entire world obviously going to the same destination you are, or by people who are over being crowded in their own gates and have come to occupy yours and refuse to yield their seat, because most likely, they are bogarting a power outlet to charge their phones so that they can listen to music or watch video without any headphones on and zero fucks to give to the people around them.
The gate agent will also be on a power trip, and lord have mercy on your soul if you are flying a budget airline like Spirit or Frontier, where the greatest pleasure of their days, as well as bystanders of higher intellects, are watching and hoping to watch people get caught trying to smuggle a rollaboard onto their flights and claim it to be a personal item akin to a purse or a fanny pack. But otherwise, it’s going to be a mess of humanity, which in this case isn’t necessarily the gate agents’ fault as much as it is just an unfortunate process of boarding a plane being a pain in the ass no matter what airline you’re on.
But yeah, seriously, if ATL could just clear up the legion of inefficiencies that are present infrastructurally, then they absolutely wouldn’t need to even entertain the idea of a second airport. Obviously, that will never, ever happen, so we’ll be subject to silly hypotheticals like this one, but at the same time, it might not be the worst idea in the world, either… Like if there were a second airport, that were like the size of Richmond International, I’d much rather go there over fucking ATL. But I’m not here to defend the idea, I’m here to shit on it.
Also what’s up with all this nonsense about building a hypothetical second in Dawsonville? What is up with Dawsonville that they think about building a mega venue up there, and tossing the idea of a second airport up there anyway? It’s about as proximity to Atlanta as Washington Dulles is to actual Washington DC, which is to say it’s far as shit, but if I had to take a guess, if a second airport comes to fruition regardless of the fact that it’s wholly unneeded, there are probably a bunch of white men who stand to make a whole lot of money in the process.
The point remains, back to the original question, does Atlanta need a second airport? Which brings us back to the original answer: no.
