Visitors this holiday season to Sacramento International Airport will be gawking skyward, but not at planes.

Sacramento's largest construction project, a $1 billion airport expansion, has risen fast in recent weeks on the Natomas plain, offering fliers the first solid views of what the future airport will look like, and how it will function.

"It's very contemporary," said Jeff Holden, an executive with Clear Channel Media who got a bird's- eye view flying in from Chicago last week. "It's winglike."

The expansion, called the Big Build by Sacramento County executives, has been under way for more than a year. But only recently has the rising steel begun to take shape.

An imposing new central terminal is expected to be finished and open by spring 2012. Antiquated Terminal B will be demolished. Terminal A will become the airport's secondary passenger facility.

It's been, at times, a project on a thin edge financially.

When the recession hit, officials were forced to excise a planned hotel from the project, and indefinitely cancel a parking garage. Frozen lending markets had airport officials briefly scrounging for extra money.

But a successful bond sale several months ago and tax breaks through the federal government's economic stimulus appear to have returned the project to solid footing.

At the center of the expansion is the main terminal building. Its walls, angled out, and its vaulted atrium lobby are now framed in steel.

Construction of the terminal is nearly a month behind schedule because architects had to redesign a portion of it after the planned terminal hotel was eliminated. Project manager Leonard Takayama said crews, however, expect to get caught up and meet their deadline, in 2012.

Some 200 workers were on-site Friday. Most conspicuous among them were the construction trade's tightrope walkers – steelworkers treading 22-inch-wide girders, six stories high, as they secured the structure's roof underskin.

Nearby, workers had poured the first concrete for the "automated people mover" guideway that emerges from the terminal's third floor.

Falsework for that elevated tramway has been built over the airport road onto the north airfield, where twin trams eventually will take fliers on a 90-second curving ride above the tarmac to a new concourse building and 19 jet gateways.

On Friday, crews in the airfield were laying the underskin of a swooping concourse roofline that gleamed in the sunlight.

When finished, it won't be allowed to gleam too much, though, officials say. The final stainless steel skin will be burnished so that reflected sunlight doesn't get in the eyes of pilots or air traffic controllers.

Airport officials, who have been staring at computer drawings of the facility for years, say they find themselves noting things they hadn't before.

"The vaulted ticket lobby is a lot more dramatic than the computer renderings showed," project manager Takayama said.

"It's going to surprise a few people coming out for the holidays," said airport spokeswoman Gina Swankie.

Swankie warned people arriving for the Thanksgiving and Christmas season that some parking lots have been eliminated and entrances to others have been changed.

New signs will be up and airport workers are expected to be stationed at some lots during peak times to help drivers.

Several lanes on the airport road currently are closed to make room for construction, causing some bottlenecks. But all lanes should be reopened before Thanksgiving week, Swankie said.

Construction will continue through winter, followed by a larger push next spring when as many as 800 workers will be on-site, airport executive Hardy Acree said.

To finish the job, officials said they will have to go back to the bond markets next year in hopes of raising a final $120 million.

The airport is an enterprise fund, not connected to the Sacramento County general fund. The construction will be paid for, over the next 30 years, partly through rents and fees on airlines. Funding also is coming from an existing $4.50 ticket surcharge on passengers, parking fares, concession fees, rental car fees and some federal government grants.

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