Hopefully, I’ve boarded my last flight out of the old terminal at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. I say hopefully because the city and its travelers were promised a glistening new terminal would be open already – with several planned opening dates passed like departure times on a steamy and stormy South Louisiana afternoon. Now, the signs promise that we’ll begin flying from the new MSY in Spring 2019.
If you follow the calendar, Spring technically begins on March 20 and ends on June 21. But if you track seasons by local weather in South Louisiana you know that spring ends in NOLA sometime shortly after Jazz Fest in April, and long before either Memorial Day or the official June calendar date.
My next departures from MSY are booked for April and May, with a return scheduled in mid-June. All technically are in Spring, so there’s a chance the new terminal will be ready. But if both politics and time work as usual in New Orleans, I’ll be flying into and out of the same old terminal on all my current trips. See, New Orleans often is referred to as the City that Care Forgot. And those in Louisiana politics seem to forget to care about New Orleans and time schedules, so I don’t have great confidence in yet another promise of the terminal opening.
Before I detour into a general political rant – especially about Louisiana politics which can best be described as a combination of banana republic shenanigans and pre-prison entertainment by those voted most likely to consort with strippers or utilize the services of high-priced prostitutes — let’s get back to the matter at hand. And that’s saying goodbye to the old terminal at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport at Moisant Field, or just goodbye old MSY.
What’s to Love?
My own history with MSY is a gumbo of interesting, challenging and mixed experiences of on-time arrivals, weather-related flight delays, suffering through lost baggage and fighting the atrocious terminal traffic during peak times. But I genuinely love some things about the old terminal. For example:
- When you arrive, the old terminal experience represents exactly what you’ll find in the city itself. Heat any time of year. Humidity always. Plentiful food and adult beverages. New Orleans blues, jazz, zydeco and mambo music. Mardi Gras masks, costumes and beads. The Krewe of Recent Arrivals sauntering in a lazy, hopeful parade to the baggage claim area and the party beyond. The ragged Krewe of Next Departures moving more slowly than Rex on Canal Street. And a structure that suffers just enough benign neglect to make it charming when you take the time to explore.
- If you are departing in an over-partied state where you didn’t have time to shop for unique New Orleans trinkets, you can find them all here. That’s right, you will never have to tell your disappointed kids and relatives that you were too hungover to shop for them after surviving hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s. Or maybe, just maybe, you would prefer a storyline that you bought all those beads at an airport gift shop instead of sharing your real shirt-raising story – most of which you’re not likely to remember clearly anyway.
- If you want one last chance for New Orleans cuisine, this airport terminal offers a credible selection of some local restaurants and a reasonable facsimile of their actual famous favorite dishes. Don’t expect the full menus or the finest preparation methods since the airport food outlets are all managed by Delaware North, a Buffalo, NY, based corporation that sounds like it knows more about railroads than remoulades. But if you didn’t enjoy enough rich food, there’s a sampling here. The main terminal location of Dooky Chase doesn’t offer the noon-time buffet of the original mid-City landmark, but it does serve some of the restaurant’s fried chicken and other original dishes. Same for Ye Olde College Inn, where New Orleans po-boys, a pretty-good Southern shrimp and grits, and some hometown bread pudding highlight the menu. And don’t forget Lucky Dog, the iconic hot dog cart which took on a literary life in the Pulitzer Award-winning local novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. Even the Delta Sky Club lounge feature good food which sometimes includes gumbo, jambalaya and beignets. And I’ve had one of my top three all-time-best Bloody Marys in that Sky Club, someone’s special concoction of rich tomato-ey liquid stirred together with secret herbs and spices in a recipe which would be more interesting to me than the elusive original version of the Colonel’s Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Fun Facts about MSY
Now before we say our final goodbyes, here are a few things that you may not know about the old terminal and MSY:
- World’s second-lowest airport. Many people know that New Orleans itself lies mostly at or below sea level. The elevation of Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport is 4.5 feet above sea level. The only airport with a lower elevation: Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport in the Netherlands at 11 feet below sea level. And yes, New Orleans airport has flooded, but it wasn’t during Hurricane Katrina. A year after its opening, a hurricane swamped the new airport under 2.5 feet of water before today’s levee system fully protected it.
- One of the largest in the US. Well, at one time, long ago. When MSY opened in 1946, it’s three 5,000-foot runways and one 7,000-foot runway plus 1,300+ acres of land made it enormous. Today, not so impressive, especially when compared in area to DEN, DFW or MCO, passenger traffic at ATL, LAX or ORD, and amenities to – well, just about anywhere, especially the world’s Top 10 best airports.
- King of the Aviators. New Orleans Mardi Gras kings reign over the city during the pre-Lenten season. The airport’s original name came from a different king: the “King of the Aviators,” John Bevins Moisant. An early airplane designer and wealthy business-man-turned-pilot who also organized two plots to overthrow the government of El Salvador, Moisant had a distinguished-but-short flying career. After recording the first passenger flight over the English Channel (it included his mechanic and his cat, Mademoiselle Fifi), he founded the Moisant International Aviators, a flying circus performing barnstorming acts around the US. Arriving in New Orleans at New Year’s 1910 to prepare for the prestigious Michelin Cup for longest sustained flight, he died after taking off from today’s City Park and crashing near today’s airport site.
- Why MSY? All airports have a three-letter IATA designation, and the original Lakefront Airport still retains the NEW code for New Orleans. But why MSY? If you guessed that the M honors John Moisant, that’s correct. So what about SY? After Moisant crashed into the empty field, it became a pasture used for grazing cattle. The owners named the field and the related processing facility Moisant Stock Yards. And the designation MSY was adopted when the new airport opened as Moisant Field in 1946. Of course, that seems kind of appropriate now when air travelers are often herded like cattle.
My Own History with MSY
Growing up outside of the city, the airport provided a collection of time-marking and catastrophic events that stick with me today. My first real awareness of MSY was in March 1967, when a Delta training flight lost two engines during a night time approach and crashed into the Hilton Hotel, just across Airline Highway from the original terminal. The crash occurred near 1 am local time, long after bedtime for a 10-year-old. And although our small town was 30 miles away, the jet-fuel-powered fire resulted in the blare of nighttime sirens summoning volunteer firemen from our community to join the fire fighting and rescue efforts. The next day and for days after, television images from the three New Orleans broadcast stations dominated the local news.
1972 marked my first trip to the airport. A Christmas-time earthquake had leveled much of Managua, Nicaragua. Boy Scout Troop 321 and others on our area participated in an emergency relief drive in the immediate aftermath, and we traveled to the airport to unload our donations at a cavernous hangar near the main terminal.
And on July 9, 1982, a Pan Am jet crashed into a residential area in Kenner less than one minute after take-off, forced down by microburst wind shear. All 146 passengers and another eight people on the ground were killed. This occurred about a year after I had abandoned my first career in newspaper jobs nearby, during which I reported on a twin-engine plane crash. Aside from the sorrow I felt for all the victims of the Pan Am, I clearly remember how thankful I was for not being called on to photograph and report that story, even the recovery of the surviving “Miracle Baby” found in the wreckage of a home.
More recently, MSY memories and experiences were happy and pleasant. For a variety of family reasons, we’ve departed and returned to MSY for extended vacations when cruising the Mediterranean, the Baltic, around Scotland and England, and Alaska. And although today we live near and mostly fly from the world’s busiest airport in Atlanta, our summer vacation plans still often begin and end with flights at MSY.
And that brings me back to the beginning. Hopefully, I’ve made my last flight from the old terminal. But if not, we’ll join the Krewe of Departures for another parade through the terminal, stop for some beignets, grab one last drink, toast to our good times, and say au revoir all over again.
