Springfield Aiport: An early morning tour
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The exterior of the new terminal at Springfield-Branson National Airport, as seen from the parking lot. |
417 Magazine editor Katie Pollock attended the Chamber's Good Morning Springfield breakfast event this morning, which was hosted at the new midfield terminal at Springfield-Branson National Airport. Photos by Katie Pollock.
• A few folks, including Springfield City Manager Greg Burris, gave updates on the state of things in Springfield and the school district, and they reminded people to vote on Tuesday (mayoral and City Council elections).
• Officials reminded people that taxpayers didn’t pay for the airport.
• Then Gary Cyr (airport administrator) and two of the projects heads who worked on the aiport, were interviewed about the airport’s highlights. Here’s some (verbatim from Katie's notes):
— There are no stairs, so it’s safer as people rush to and from their flights. Parking, check-in, security, everything is on one level.
— It’s designed to reflect an Ozarks landscape and all the natural beauty in this region. And it really does look nice. The colors are very natural: blues, tans and browns. There’s a ton of natural light that streams in through the big windows, which are made of many rectangular panes of blue and
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A baggage/check-in desk at the new Springfield-Branson National Airport. |
clear glass. A few shades of blue. Very pretty. The walls have waves of brown, beige and white tiles, some of them glazed to be shiny while others are matte. It looks like a slice of terrain. The carpeting looked like water in some places and like river rocks in others (not abstractly representing water and rocks... It literally looks like a picture of water and rocks). The design has three zones: Water (water carpet, blue glass), Geological (the layered wall tiles) and Landscape (trees in the half of the building that we didn’t get to see... I didn’t see them, so I'm not sure, but I don’t think they are real. Brochure says “abstract trees”)
• Cyr also talked about how he doesn’t think the new airport in Branson will be competition, even though Springfield flies to three of Branson’s four cities. He says Branson is aiming for a different market and that even if Springfieldians fly out of Branson once to test it out, they’ll return to Springfield because it’s “the airport of record here.”
• Important to note: Once the new terminal opens on May 6, people won’t be able to get to the airport via Kearney Street anymore. A new road called Airport Boulevard will be open when the airport opens, and it can be accessed via Chestnut Expressway. There’s a map of this in some of the materials they gave us.
• Some other highlights from materials they gave us:
— 46,000 square feet of glass was used on the terminal
— 45,000 square feet of wall tile were used. (That’s 4.26 miles.)
— More than 2,700 tons of steel were used on the airport.
— The project cost $117 million and took about three years.
— The new terminal is 275,000 square feet. The old one was 175,000 square feet.
— It’ll have 10 gates, expandable to 60.
— It’ll have 1,826 parking spaces.
Katie Pollock, editor
