St. Louis Lambert International Airport
Facts on STL
In October 1910 the airfield hosted the first International Air Meet, drawing the Wright brothers and their exhibition team; President Theodore Roosevelt flew there with pilot Arch Hoxsey on October 11, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to fly.
Source: Wikipedia
Albert Bond Lambert, the airport's namesake, ran Lambert Pharmacal -- makers of Listerine -- for over 25 years, and was also an Olympic athlete: he won a silver medal in golf for the United States at the 1904 St. Louis Games, one of only two Olympic golf tournaments held before the sport's long hiatus.
Source: Wikipedia
Lambert, the airport's namesake, took flying lessons from Orville Wright and became the first person in St. Louis to hold a pilot's license; in 1925 he personally bought the 170-acre field that bears his name, developed it with hangars and a terminal, then sold it to the city in 1928 for the exact price he had paid, making it one of the first municipally owned airports in the country.
Source: Wikipedia
In the late 1920s Lambert Field became the first airport with an air traffic control system -- though the first controller, Archie League, communicated with pilots using hand-waved flags rather than radio.
Source: Wikipedia
Charles Lindbergh flew his first piloting job carrying airmail out of Lambert Field for Robertson Aircraft Corporation, and stopped there again on his cross-country flight from San Diego to New York about a week before his transatlantic flight to Paris in 1927.
Source: Wikipedia
Architect Minoru Yamasaki -- later famous for the World Trade Center -- designed Lambert's distinctive three-domed terminal, completed in 1956 for $7.2 million; the design predated the visually similar TWA terminal built at New York's JFK a few years later.
Source: Wikipedia
TWA made Lambert its dominant hub after 1978 deregulation, swapping three of its Chicago gates for five American Airlines gates in St. Louis; by 2000 the airport's passenger traffic peaked at an all-time high of 30.6 million.
Source: Wikipedia
On Good Friday, April 22, 2011, a tornado struck Lambert's Terminal 1, destroying jetways and shattering more than half its windows, and pushing a baggage conveyor belt into a parked Southwest Airlines jet; the airport closed for hours before reopening at reduced capacity.
Source: Wikipedia