Photography by Whitney Curtis
On any given day, Terminal 1 at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport is teeming with activity. Yet this hive is something of an illusion: Two of the main terminal’s four concourses are closed entirely, compressing activity into a small footprint. A new lounge near the entrance, featuring floor-to-ceiling windows and a cascading water wall, offers a spot of serenity made possible by the removal of no-longer-needed ticket counters. Half a mile to the east is Terminal 2, the base for Southwest Airlines, which handles almost as many passengers each day as the main terminal.
Of course, the days of international flights are largely gone, with just a few such direct flights remaining. Even the most familiar airline, American Airlines, Trans World Airlines’ successor, accounts for just 15 percent of flights, down from almost 80 percent in the late ’90s. On one visit, a departure board shows an array of lesser-known airlines—AirTran Airways, Alaska Airlines, Frontier Airlines—that airport director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge has lured to St. Louis in recent years, in the hope that Lambert can “crawl its way back up” to financial stability.
In many ways, Hamm-Niebruegge’s career reflects Lambert’s story. In the 1980s, she worked at Ozark Air Lines, a fast-growing regional carrier that was taken over by an ascending TWA. There, she worked her way up to oversee North American operations and 8,000 employees. Then, in July 2003, following the TWA–American merger, American announced it would slash the number of daily departures in St. Louis from 417 to 207. Hamm-Niebruegge had a choice: Take a better-paying job in Dallas–Fort Worth, where American was concentrating its activities, or oversee its shrinking St. Louis operations. She became managing director of the airline’s St. Louis operations, a job she held until 2009, when Mayor Francis Slay appointed her as airport director.
At the turn of the millennium, Lambert had expansion on its mind. It had acquired land from neighboring Bridgeton and St. Ann to build a new runway, displacing more than 6,000 residents. Yet the fourth runway, completed in 2006, is seldom used today. It has added to costs for airlines and in turn passengers, making Lambert less competitive. Naturally, the airport’s proponents describe the runway as an untapped asset—it’s a key part of the case for increasing cargo traffic to St. Louis—rather than a multibillion-dollar miscalculation. The current level of activity at the airport is lower than even the lowest of the long-range forecasts made in the mid-’90s to support the expansion effort.
William Kiburz of Coronet Travel in Richmond Heights is vice president of the company that his parents founded. He grew up during TWA’s glory days, when you could fly nonstop to Paris and London from St. Louis. Talking to others in the travel industry, he says, there’s a consensus that “what happened to St. Louis is one of the saddest stories in travel.” Before the recent remodel, there was a period when you might see one American Airlines agent manning an area once staffed by four. It wasn’t uncommon to walk down an empty hallway. “There are times it’s dead,” Kiburz says.
Despite its much-reduced footprint, however, Kiburz believes Lambert remains a pleasant place to fly. It’s not Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, which can be “a nightmare logistically and weatherwise,” he says. But it pales in comparison to Minneapolis–St. Paul, a metro area only slightly more populous than St. Louis, which has an airport so lively and modern, it makes St. Louis “feel like the most rural place in the world,” he says.
As a whole, the airline industry has been in a state of perpetual crisis for more than a decade. Game-changing trends are almost too many to enumerate: airline consolidation, with archrivals joining forces to avoid bankruptcy; the fallout from 9/11 resulting in overhauled security measures, increased costs, and fewer people flying; political gridlock in D.C., complicating long-term infrastructure planning.
Then, in 2011, fate took a twist for an already struggling airport.
A TURNING POINT
On Good Friday, Hamm-Niebruegge left work to celebrate a friend’s anniversary at a Frontenac restaurant. Staff had been monitoring the weather all day, but when she left work, it was with an understanding that the worst “was going to go around us.”
Just after 8 p.m., she received a call. Terminal 1 had taken a direct hit, tearing a large section of roof off Concourse C. Hamm-Niebruegge and her husband left the restaurant right away. Driving down Lindbergh Boulevard, “it did not look bad until we hit St. Charles Rock Road,” she recalls. “Then you could start to see uprooted trees, poles down over the highway.” As their car pulled in, no more than 20 minutes after the tornado swept through, her husband told her to prepare for the worst. Fortunately, the injuries were relatively minor; five people were taken to the hospital and released the same night. By the following night, the terminal was open for arrivals.
In the weeks that followed, airport staff worked 16- to 18-hour days. “We relocated airlines to D Concourse, which had been closed,” recalls Hamm-Niebruegge. “But the amenities down there were minimal. The next week was focused on ‘How can we get a Starbucks kiosk?’ ‘How can we get a couple of stores and restaurants open?’”
The focus then shifted to the renovation plan. The Airport Experience upgrade plan was adjusted, and money was shuffled from one pot to another, the distinction between renovation and rebuilding blurred. The devastated Concourse C was estimated to take a full year to rebuild. A $10 million repair bill included replacing 250 windows and 1.5 acres of roofing.
With money for capital investments, the airport was able to make unanticipated upgrades, including blast-resistant windows and a $50 mil-lion baggage-handling system to replace the explosive-detection ma-chines that once cluttered both terminals. Cash flow also improved, be-cause “the insurance company did front us money along the way,” Hamm-Niebruegge says. The resulting renovation was slightly more upscale than initially planned, with shops and restaurants reflective of St. Louis’ culture.
On April 2, 2012, three weeks before the anniversary of the tornado, Concourse C reopened.
Before the tornado struck, civic pride in Lambert had dwindled. American Airlines had relegated St. Louis from a hub to a spoke, with Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas–Fort Worth gaining the extra traffic. There was a widespread feeling that the airport was unattractive and that it didn’t provide the level of service that the public wanted. The rebuilding, however, allowed Hamm-Niebruegge to make much-needed improvements and to reassert the airport’s regional significance. “Once we got through everything,” she says, “it did help us position ourselves better going forward.”
LOOKING OVERSEAS
At the same time that Lambert was being re-built, other plans were in the works. In fall 2011, after four years of behind-the-scenes meetings, the airport unveiled plans to reinvent itself as a cargo hub.
The economic merits were persuasive. Increased levels of global trade would result in greater use of airfreight, and diversifying operations could help offset lackluster levels of passenger traffic. Geographically, Lambert’s location would allow companies to distribute products across the U.S. Sections of near north St. Louis and North County were also primed for redevelopment. And the airport claims to have enough space to dedicate a whole section to cargo, with the advantages of a new runway and streamlined customs system. “We have such a massive airfield that is underutilized with so much potential for development,” says Hamm-Niebruegge. “We are the perfect setting.”
In Jefferson City, the case for a complex set of financial incentives to subsidize the cargo hub’s development was gaining strength as the legislature met in a special session. It was called The Big Idea. The game-changing sweetener, proposed in 2011, was a subsidy for freight forwarders that would lower export cost by40 cents per kilogram, or every 2.2 pounds, at an estimated cost of $60 million annually. Also on the table were $300 million in incentives to encourage development of a cargo zone in North County, near the airport. At the same time,Gov. Jay Nixon visited China, in part to bolster Chinese commitment. “We felt very comfort-able we were going to get it through the legislature,” Hamm-Niebruegge recalls.
China Cargo Airlines, a state-owned airline formed in 2010 as a result of a merger of three regional Chinese companies, had committed to weekly flights into St. Louis. It landed its first Boeing 777F on September 22, 2011.
But despite widespread political support, the proposal collapsed. The business deal soon followed. China Cargo Airlines (now China Eastern Airlines) officially kept its spot on the airport schedule for the next two years, but it canceled its flights each week.
Insiders were not surprised. Flights from China “ended up petering out, just as we thought they would,” says Jeff Rainford, the mayor’s chief of staff. Hamm-Niebruegge suggests that China Cargo Airlines, then a relatively new company, was still in the process of weeding out duplicate and inefficient routes. Others suggest it was unclear what exports would be shipped from Lambert. “It is not economically viable to fly a full plane to St. Louis and half a plane back home,” says Rainford.
David Harris, editor of Seattle-based industry newsletter Cargo Facts, says what happened in St. Louis was part of a familiar pattern. “Airports try this all the time, but it never really works,” he says. “City governments get involved, state governments get involved, consultants are hired, and the freight still goes to Miami, Dallas, or Chicago.” Trying to create a cargo hub from zero is “a losing proposition,” he adds, noting that St. Louis “went in with its eyes wide open” and with a realistic sense of how much freight could ever pass through “a midsize city in the middle of a lot of farmland.” In recent history, Harris points out, no American city has successfully muscled its way into becoming a new cargo hub of any significant scale.
Other Midwestern cities, including Detroit, along with Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, have since launched bids to capture more freight traffic. Meanwhile, cities smaller than St. Louis—including Indianapolis; Memphis, Tennessee; and Louisville, Kentucky—remain the dominant domestic cargo markets across the region, largely due to their airports’ contracts with UPS and FedEx.
Currently, six cargo flights depart each day from Lambert, representing 2 percent of the airport’s business. The contents of some of those shipments may come as a surprise. “Ten years ago, I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined live-animal charters, but today there is growing demand from Asia and parts of Africa,” says Hamm-Niebruegge. Animals are moved around the world, not to be slaughtered for food, but because of their breeding abilities, particularly for large hog-farm operations. “We often say, ‘When pigs fly,’” says Hamm-Niebruegge. “Well, pigs are flying.”
The airport has identified a zone to the north of its property where it would like to see more warehouses, though it’s not interested in developing the land itself, says airport spokesman Jeff Lea. Instead, it’s looking for partnerships with third parties. Developer Aeroterm negotiated the right to develop an 88-acre section over 30 years, but the two-year agreement expired without any new facilities being built.
Today, the Midwest Hub Commission—the word China has been dropped from its name—is casting a wider net, turning to Latin America and the Middle East. “We will talk to any and all interested parties,” says Tim Nowak, executive director of the World Trade Center in Clayton. “The cargo will eventually come.”
Other regional leaders are also determined. County Executive Charlie Dooley vows not “to let the issue go.” Rainford predicts “a serious run at tax-credit reform.” St. Louis Regional Chamber president and CEO Joe Reagan says positioning the airport to compete as a cargo hub is a top priority for the business community, though “nobody can predict what will get across the goal line.”
In Jefferson City, the commission plans to push for the same incentives that it proposed in 2011, as part of a broad-ranging tax-reform proposal. “We will come to the table with the same piece on the freight forwarding,” says Hamm-Niebruegge. The airport was dealt a blow on August 5, though, with the defeat of the statewide transportation tax proposal. Had it passed, it would have set aside $5 million for a new cargo ramp and other infrastructure improvements at the airport. Such capital projects remain a priority for the city, though at press time it had not indicated how it would find the funds.
Whatever the long-term outcome of the proposed cargo hub is, Nowak says the effort is about more than Lambert. “It was never just an airport facility,” he says. “It was about repositioning St. Louis as an international city.”
BRINGING BACK PASSENGERS
If Lambert’s effort to build a cargo hub is a Hail Mary pass in a fiercely competitive game, then its approach to passenger traffic is to keep possession of the ball.
The airport’s effort to grow cargo business could take decades to play out. The concept also remains abstract to many St. Louisans. By contrast, residents’ quality of life is directly affected by the ability or inability to fly nonstop to other cities. One hopeful sign is the increased diversity of carriers, thanks to Hamm-Niebruegge’s strategy of courting smaller airlines to reinstate old routes or create new flights. When American Airlines cut its daily route to Seattle, for instance, what remained was a seasonal flight to the northwest, catering to Alaskan cruise customers. The airport approached Alaska Airlines and won back a daily flight to Seattle. Such a strategy has allowed Lambert to reinstate service to 20 areas, with more flights to San Francisco and D.C. slated to start in September.
Scrutinizing its data for new opportunities, the airport initially focused on destinations where at least 200 business passengers are traveling from St. Louis daily. As these routes have been reinstated, the airport has looked at destinations with 100 travelers per day. Now, the gaps are routes with 50 to 100 customers per day—not enough to fill an airplane on a regular basis. “The airlines are no longer making those marginal decisions,” Hamm-Niebruegge says. “They want an assurance these days that it is going to be profitable. They are not going move flights around the country just for the hell of it.”
As with the cargo business, every airport in the nation has an array of incentives to capture more airlines’ business. Lambert promises to pay landing fees on new routes for the first 12 months for airlines that make at least two-year commitments to fly from St. Louis. Funded by the Airport Development Fund, the program was recently renewed until June 2017. Tourism has remained a relatively small piece of the passenger pie, so future growth is likely to come from business routes. The recent growth of tech companies, for instance, has led to increased service to San Francisco. “The only way we can be successful at the airport is if we partner with the region to grow our regional economy,” says Hamm-Niebruegge.
Daniel Rust, assistant director of the University of Missouri–St. Louis’ Center for Transportation Studies, predicts Southwest—something of an outlier in the airline industry, having prospered under a no-frills business model—will continue to grow, and the ongoing integration of American Airlines and US Airways could take advantage of Lambert’s excess capacity. “There are some opportunities there,” he says.
Rust has written a book on the history of the passenger experience, Flying Across America, and he’s working on a history of Lambert, one of the nation’s first municipal airports. It’s noteworthy, he says, because it has reinvented itself many times over: “It is a microcosm of aviation history.”
Editor’s Note: Katherine Gordon contributed to researching this article.
