Lambert Airport St. Louis

By Matthew Owens



My thesis is to design a new passenger terminal for Williamson County Regional Airport. So as an independent study I have been taking an airport planning course through the aviation department this semester. I actually finished up the class this last week, turns out it was a six week course that meets from 8am to 4pm on Saturdays, not how I thought I would be spending my Saturdays, so I am glad to have that over with. I enjoyed the course taught by Dr. NewMyer whom is also serving on my thesis committee. I got a lot of really good information out of it and I know it will help make my thesis that much stronger.

One of the interesting things that we got to do in the planning course was to take a trip to Lambert International Airport in St. Louis. On this trip to the airport we got to speak with the director of airport planning, got to ride around the airfield and around the terminal building, we also got a tour of the control tower and got to check out concourse C, which was the concourse that was severely damaged in a tornado last April.

As you may or may not remember there was a tornado that ripped right through the airport last April. The airport was closed for almost twenty-four hours, not letting flights in or out. The damage that the airport sustained was quite large. The majority of the windows in the main terminal building were blown out; debris was strung out all over the airfield, and concourse C was hit hard. In our talk with the director of airport planning, he showed us actual video surveillance of the airport when the tornado hit. It was pretty amazing to see the people scrambling for cover while debris starts to fly all over the place. Fortunately no one lost their life and no one was severally injured, only a dozen or so people had to go to the hospital to be treated for cuts and bumps. Concourse C was hit the hardest since the path of the tornado went right over the top of it. Large sections of the roof were completely blown off and most of the windows were blown out, so concourse C has been closed since last April while they have been reconstructing it. Luckily the airport had a concourse that was not being used at the time, so they could transfer the operations of concourse C to that concourse. The construction costs to repair concourse C is now up to 100 million. The planners for the repair took the opportunity to upgrade the facilities in the concourse, so concourse C will have the latest and greatest of technologies throughout it.

I snapped a photo looking down the concourse which as you can see is pretty close to being completed, they are hoping to have it open and functional by this April.