McGhee Tyson Airport Flight Plan Terminal Modernization

Knoxville outgrew its terminal, and the fix is a decade long.

The Metropolitan Knoxville Airport Authority selected Parsons on August 18, 2026 to run program and construction management for the McGhee Tyson Terminal Area Development Plan, marketed as Flight Plan. The award puts a single firm across a stack of packages that runs to 2030 and totals well over half a billion dollars.

Project Scope

The first package is already in the ground: a $186 million parking garage and terminal roadway rebuild adding roughly 3,500 spaces, targeted for completion in 2027. Landside work of that size at an operating airport is mostly a sequencing problem, since the roadway being replaced is the only way to the curb.

The remaining packages carry an estimated $356.6 million. They add six gates, expand the TSA security checkpoint, and expand the airport’s central energy plant, which has to grow before the added conditioned square footage can be served. The airport confirmed $10 million in FY2026 Airport Terminal Program funding on June 3, 2026, earmarked for the checkpoint work.

Why It Matters

McGhee Tyson is the kind of mid-size commercial airport that spent the last two decades running near its design capacity and is now trying to catch up in one program instead of a series of patches. Knoxville’s passenger counts have grown steadily since 2021, and the terminal that serves them was built for a smaller operation.

The program-management structure is the part worth watching. Rather than bidding each package into a separate CM relationship, MKAA put Parsons over the whole sequence, which concentrates the schedule risk in one contract and gives the authority a single throat to choke on interfaces between the garage, the roadway, the checkpoint and the energy plant. That model has become the default on airport capital programs of this size, and Flight Plan will be a readable test of it in a market without a large local aviation contractor bench.

Project Team & Details