ATLANTA — U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg joined local leaders Thursday at the world’s busiest airport to mark a milestone in one of the country’s major airport infrastructure initiatives.

Buttigieg joined Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens at the construction site where work is underway to build pieces of an expansion of Hartsfield-Jackson’s Concourse D.

“For a long time we were lamenting the condition of America’s airports,” Buttigieg said. Now, he said “we have the best and most innovative style of construction to deliver world-class terminals to the busiest airport in the world.”

The officials gathered to commemorate the first move of a huge prefab section of the expansion to the concourse site earlier this week, marking a step forward in the project to alleviate congestion in a crowded part of the airport.

Concourse D is the narrowest concourse of the Atlanta airport, and it becomes over-crowded during busy periods, when passengers have to push their way through crowds to get to their flights.

Hartsfield-Jackson General Manager Balram Bheodari said he recognized that “the customer service level that we are providing customers (is) an F on Concourse D” and there was a “need to do something.”

Passenger counts are expected to continue to grow. But the world’s busiest airport can’t shut down for construction.

The approach Hartsfield-Jackson is taking to widen Concourse D from 60 feet to 99 feet is to prefab sections of the expansion, so construction can go on without shutting down the working concourse.

The project received $40 million in federal funding from the federal bipartisan infrastructure law. The full project, including the construction of extra gates on Concourse E to make up for gates lost due to the work, will cost a total of $1.4 billion and take until 2029 to complete.

Buttigieg said the $40 million “made it possible to accelerate and advance this project” and is part of a larger flow of over a billion dollars of federal funding for airport terminal projects across the country.

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