Lambert-St. Louis International Airport Expected to Be Back to Normal by Mid-week

Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge: Southwest Airlines at 100% operation on Sunday.

Flights partially resumed out of Lambert Airport Sunday after the area’s most powerful tornado in decades caused significant damage there. The airport expects all 256 daily departures to be back on schedule by the middle of the week.

Southwest Airlines operates out of Terminal 2, which had minimal damage.

Carriers on the A concourse were operating at about 80% Sunday.

C Concourse is still closed and the air carriers have relocated. Air Tran and Frontier have re-located or were in the process of relocating Sunday to the B Concourse and were operating at about 50% Sunday. American and Cape Air were relocated to the D Councourse, and were expected to be re-opened Monday morning.

A tornado struck at approximately 8:10PM on April 22, 2011 struck heavily damaging Concourse C and Terminal 1 of the airport. Jetways were destroyed and over half of the windows of the terminals were broken. One jet was moved away from its jetway during the storm, with passengers were still on-board.

One plane from Southwest Airlines was damaged when the wind pushed a conveyor belt used for loading baggage into it. American Airlines said that four of its planes were damaged, two of them significantly. One was buffeted by 80 MPH crosswinds while taxiing in from a landing when the tornado hit and the other has possible damage to its landing gear.

Lambert-St. Louis International Airport was temporarily closed by the FAA on Apr 22 at 08:54 PM CDT.

The tornado was rated an EF4 tornado as it approached about one mile southwest of the airport near Old St. Charles Road and Harmann Estates Drive. At the airport terminal, the tornado was rated and EF2 tornado.

See also …
National Weather Service — St. Louis Good Friday Tornado Event April 22 2011

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