Miami airport’s grounded Skytrain should be rolling again in weeks, director says
Months after structural cracking forced an emergency end to train rides at Miami International Airport’s longest concourse, Skytrain should be running again by the spring, according to MIA’s director.
Ralph Cutie, who oversees the county-owned airport as Miami-Dade’s Aviation director, told a Miami-Dade committee that private crews are preparing to fix minor cracking on the automated train line’s concrete supports.
READ MORE: ‘Extensive structural cracking’ closed MIA’s Skytrain. That means a mile walk for many
The rail cars run above the mile-long Concourse D, where American Airlines, MIA’s largest carrier, operates its gates. Cutie said he expects the first phase of the repairs to be finished by March, allowing three of SkyTrain’s four stations to reopen.
“At a minimum, we can run service on three quarters of the system,” he told the County Commission’s Airport and Economic Development Committee.
Cutie said the construction work would allow Skytrain to resume arrivals at stations 2, 3 and 4, with more extensive work needed to put Station 1 back in service.
That would mean train rides returning to Concourse D’s most remote gates, with Station 4 allowing passengers to board at Gate 46 and then ride to Station 2 to the exit for baggage claim and the main terminal at Gate 24.
Skytrain’s Station 1 sits above Gate D17, home to American’s Admirals Club lounge. Cutie did not offer an estimate for when the more extensive cracking in that area of the train system would be repaired.
American and MIA have been running shuttles in Concourse D and buses outside the terminal for passengers and employees who don’t want to walk the roughly one mile Skytrain route.
The $130 million train opened in 2010 as part of an MIA expansion that included a much longer concourse for American and its growing schedule of flights.
Inspectors flagged cracking in Skytrain columns in 2021 but called them minor, according to documents the airport released shortly after the train’s emergency shutdown on Sept. 15.
When engineers inspected the columns in early September 2023, they reported “extensive structural cracking” and recommended an immediate closure of the train system. That happened hours later, according to the documents.
No explanation was given on why the problems were not spotted sooner, except that the cracks were identified in state-required inspections.
