Kansas City's new airport is quiet, smells like barbecue, and involves lots of walking

Dec 07, 2023

KANSAS CITY, Missouri — The newest large airport in the country is right here, smack in the middle of America. Aviation nerds get excited about new airports, and the algorithm on Google News decided I was an aviation nerd because I wrote a few pieces about flight etiquette.

Following the opening of this airport and after visiting it, I noticed some facts of broader cultural relevance:

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When I made it through security, and while my daughter was putting her shoes back on (she had TSA PreCheck because she was flying with me, but the buckles on her high heels set off the metal detector), I wandered down a short corridor and noticed something I’ve never seen at any other airport: a quiet lounge.

The sign said it was open to anyone at no cost and that you just had to be quiet. This sounded appealing since I had just spent two days talking to and entertaining people. But then, before I stepped into the quiet lounge, I looked around the terminal and realized I was already in a quiet lounge.

Kansas City International Airport is the quietest airport I’ve ever been in. The pre-security part of the Omaha airport is the second quietest.

I’m sure the architects built the new Kansas City airport to be less noisy, but I think a big part of it is just that people in the heartland speak less and more quietly. (I didn’t write “the Midwest” because I don’t think this is true in much of the Upper Midwest.)

My daughter first noticed this quietude in southwest Iowa over the weekend. We were at a church picnic for my parish away from home, St. Patrick’s in Imogene. My daughter realized all these friends and neighbors who were happy to spend a beautiful and fun Saturday evening together were speaking much less and much less loudly than our friends in the Washington area do.

So, Kansas City airport is a quiet airport in part because the heartland is a quieter place.

Another cultural import of this new airport, in contrast to its recently demolished predecessor, involves security.

When Kansas City opened its old airport in 1972, it had been built in an ingenious clover shape. Drivers drove inside the clover while the airplanes were on the outside. The actual terminal was fairly narrow. The result was that your mother or your cabbie could drop you off basically right in front of your gate. From your car to your jetway might be 30 yards.

Pretty quickly, however, this ingenious plan was foiled by security checkpoints. Hijackings became a thing in the 1970s, and airlines started their preflight security screenings. So, after just a few months of operating as a very convenient layout, the Kansas City airport became a crowded and awkward mess.

Then, as you can imagine, our response to 9/11 made things much worse. The result was an airport with long, thin walkways, ugly dividers, awkward shapes, and little room for commerce or dining.

Related to all of this was something else that is dated: a hatred for walking.

These days, we think walking is good. We wear Fitbits and try to hit 10,000 steps a day. “Take the stairs,” folks say.

That wasn’t true a couple of generations ago. Modernity was supposed to conquer all sorts of ills, one of which was walking. We built homes with attached garages. We built strip malls with parking right out front. And we built airports whose organizing principle was minimizing walking.

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I’m not just talking about Kansas City here. Check out this video advertising Dulles.

The new Kansas City International Airport has plenty of walking, which, by the way, affords you ample opportunity to buy souvenirs and smell the barbecue of the restaurants, and so spend lots of money there.