Albuquerque Sunport Transformation

The next phase of a 35-year relationship.

The Albuquerque International Sunport is New Mexico’s largest airport, serving more than 5 million travelers every year. It’s a fixture of our community and, for many, is the first introduction to our unique and beautiful state.

The Sunport also helped put Jaynes on the map as a contractor in the Southwest.

Our History With the Sunport

Back in 1989, Jaynes was contracted to build a 1.3 million-square-foot parking garage. Over the decades leading up to this, we’d grown from a humble small concrete business to a general contractor with two locations in the state. But the Sunport parking garage project was the biggest thing we’d tackled to date, and it was on us to rise to the occasion.

Our team self-performed half of the project, pouring roughly 82,000 tons of concrete and overseeing the construction of a structure that continues to serve thousands of people each day. Its completion helped our company see ourselves in a new light, and it made a big impression on how others viewed us as contractors.

Now, so much has changed: our size, the tools and processes we use, our reputation as leaders in construction. But we remain honored and humbled to be once more working with the Sunport, this time on a renovation project whose complexity and sophistication have once more called us to rise to the challenge.

Our Return to the Albuquerque Sunport

The ongoing Sunport renovation project was awarded in 2022 and is projected to be finished in the first quarter of 2025. The project’s scope includes the renovation of 452,000 square feet of interior space, including updates to the site’s safety and security infrastructure as well as greatly expanding the post-security footprint for food and retail amenities for travelers.

Some important elements of the project have included:

• Relocating the TSA station to gain approximately 10,000 square feet of queuing space for travelers going through airport security.
• Converting the old TSA space to a new food court, providing food and beverage concessions, and making more room for local businesses to enter that space.
• Adding upgraded fire protection infrastructure, including sprinklers in areas that did not previously have them.
• These improvements will provide tremendous benefit to the Albuquerque Sunport and its many visitors, both in terms of safety and comfort.

Rising to the Challenge Means More Sophisticated Processes

In 1989, our self-performance concrete was the foundation of our identity and strength as an organization, and the Sunport project was a perfect illustration of our capabilities in that space. Similarly, today’s renovation offers another snapshot of our current strengths and processes:

Delivery Method

Jaynes is acting as Construction Manager at Risk for the project. Preconstruction in general and CMAR especially have been invaluable tools at our disposal in the ever-shifting world of construction since the pandemic, providing greater agility to respond to staffing challenges, supply chain disruptions, and other risks.

We are encouraged by the adoption of this delivery method by others in our industry, and we’re advocates for it whenever it makes sense for a project.

Safety and Security Considerations

As a complex renovation on a functioning and busy airport, the Sunport creates plenty of logistical challenges in regard to the safety, security, and comfort of travelers and airport employees.

The security clearances required add a layer of complexity to engaging subcontractors. For example, access badges to certain areas of the site require a background check and clearance that can take several weeks.

Being involved at the outset of the project and utilizing our preconstruction process to hone timelines means we’ve been able to foresee these potential delays and work around them.

Building Information Modeling

We’ve implemented several sophisticated BIM processes, including leveraging a system called OpenSpace, which allows us to walk the job site with a 360-degree camera, capture it in detail, and integrate that snapshot view with interactive project maps.

This allows us to keep a visual record of our progress that can be shared with the owner and other stakeholders, as well as giving us a platform to clearly communicate about a project.

Our return to the Sunport isn’t just a mile marker in our decades-long relationship and a testament to our history in Albuquerque. It’s also an example of ways our processes have matured to keep up with an ever-advancing world of technology and sophisticated demands.

It’s never clear what the future may hold, but we are looking forward to many more decades of innovation, hard work, and projects that work to elevate our communities.