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And he's not finished yet. Next, McCarran plans to deploy self-service kiosks that a passenger can use to check into any flight, at the airport or at a nearby hotel. He's also upgrading to a Gigabit Ethernet backbone network to ramp up wireless and multimedia applications, a move that might not have been possible had McCarran not taken central control of IT.

Love-Hate Relationship

Walker's IT-driven philosophy has drawn praise from other airport directors and ire from airline executives unaccustomed to relinquishing so much control.

When Walker and his team first called a meeting in 1996 to discuss setting up common-use terminal equipment, or CUTE, throughout the airport to replace the airlines' hardwired proprietary terminals, the carriers sent property managers instead of IT people. It was an act of defiance, a way to proclaim that the terminal buildings were the carriers' turf. The reception was cool, to say the least. "We could have harvested ice out of that meeting," Walker recalls.

Today, all but one of the 28 carriers operating at McCarran use CUTE systems, which the airport spent $60 million to deploy. The return on investment has been noteworthy: The airlines no longer have to maintain their own systems, passengers get more reliable and accurate information, and the airport has saved more than $100 million by letting carriers share gates and ticket counters rather than building additional facilities. Says Walker: "We wore them down by a process I call 'death by a thousand cuts.'"

CUTE is the norm in Europe and Asia because the governments that run the airports there require it. It's also common in the international terminals of U.S. airports, simply because no single airline runs enough overseas flights to justify dedicated gates.

U.S. carriers generally have been reluctant to use CUTE because they like the status quo's branding advantages: When an airline has a whole terminal to itself, it can control the look of the entire facility, from the logos at the gates to the color of the wall treatments. The terminal is one big advertisement.

Now, Arinc and SITA, the two biggest sellers of CUTE systems, connect CUTE to the background signage at ticket counters, gates and baggage carousels, giving airlines more branding options. When an American Airlines employee logs onto CUTE, American's logo pops up on a monitor behind the desk. American can even add its own animation. Arinc is McCarran's vendor and integrator for CUTE.

At McCarran, the transfer of gates from one airline to another is seamless. Once the signage changes to, say, Continental, you can't tell that American ran flights out of the same gate an hour earlier, says Dick Marchi, senior vice president for technical and environmental affairs at Airports Council International (ACI), an airport trade association.

In fact, when National Airlines went out of business last November, McCarran's IT staff was able to move another airline into its counter space within a few hours. If the airlines had been using proprietary systems, this process might have taken days.

Big carriers also dislike CUTE because it makes it easier for small airlines to move in and set up shop. Discount carriers don't have to buy, deploy and maintain their own ticketing and baggage systems; they only have to write the scripts to connect their back ends to CUTE. The ticketing applications are accessed using terminal emulation, so airline employees use the same applications they're accustomed to using.

There is, however, one disadvantage for the discount airlines: Because they generally don't operate internationally, they have no code base and no experience writing interfaces to CUTE systems. This may explain why Southwest Airlines is the lone CUTE holdout at McCarran despite being the airport's No. 1 airline, representing nearly a quarter of McCarran's volume.

"Southwest has a very simple business model that's been successful, and they don't like to tinker with it," Marchi says, referring to Southwest's overall low-tech approach and its practice of buying technology in liquidation sales from defunct airlines.

Southwest also isn't part of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the body that sets standards for boarding passes, baggage tags and other documents. This organization makes sure passenger data is formatted similarly enough across airlines that it's transferable. Thanks to IATA, if your itinerary takes you on multiple airlines, you don't have to fetch your bags and check in again. If Southwest is part of your travel plans, you do.

But financial pressure and new security requirements may create a perfect storm that finally pushes Southwest and other airlines to embrace CUTE. As of April 1, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), established after 9/11, requires an individual to hold an airline-issued boarding pass in his or her name to get through security checkpoints. Previously, the only federal requirement was a printed reservation, and some airlines, such as Southwest, preferred to issue boarding passes at the gates.

The new regulation would likely result in overcrowding at ticket counters near terminal entrances, so airports are adding self-service kiosks to ease congestion. But they take up a lot of space. "If every airline wanted to have its own proprietary kiosk in the terminal, there is no way we could accommodate it," airport director Walker says. "We'd have no space. They would be lined up like news racks. People would be tripping over them to get to their gates."

Further complicating matters, the TSA has placed a luggage X-ray machine the size of a SUV where ticket counters used to be, taking additional space from the airlines.