NOLA History: Home for the Holidays…By Air

While earlier generations would ride sleek passenger trains to get New Orleans, these days, “home for the holidays” means getting on a plane, flying to a “hub” airport, then catching a jet to the Crescent City. Coming to New Orleans by plane usually means flying into the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (LANOIA), better known by its IATA code, MSY.

Commercial air travel in New Orleans has its origins in the 1930s. The city’s first airport was built by the Orleans Parish Levee Board, at the urging of then-governor Huey P. Long. The OLB fabricated a peninsula of land in Lake Pontchartrain, just east of the Industrial Canal. The airport (whose IATA code is NEW) was opened on February 10, 1934. The original name of NEW was Shushan Airport, named after Abraham Sushan, the chairman of the OLB who was the driving force behind the project. Shushan soon fell out of favor with succeeding administrations in Baton Rouge, and the airport was renamed New Orleans Airport. When MSY was opened, NEW was subsequently renamed New Orleans Lakefront Airport.

Lakefront Airport (as most locals refer to NEW) was seconded by the US Army in 1940, and was used in conjunction with Camp Leroy Johnson (what is now the East Campus of the University of New Orleans) to airlift military supplies needed for the port of New Orleans, or that were to be shipped further through the port. As WWII went on, it was clear to the city’s leaders that a new airport would be required once the war was over and civil aviation returned to normal.

One of the more interesting proposals for a new airport in New Orleans was to build an artificial island in Lake Pontchartrain. This idea was rejected in favor of construction of a land-based airport west of the city in Kenner. The city acquired the land that was the location of the Moisant Stock Yards in Kenner.

The stockyards and the fields surrounding them were named after John Bevins Moisant, an aviation pioneer who was killed there on December 31, 1910, when his plane crashed. The city opened Moisant Field in 1947, and a marker commemorating Moisant was placed at the airport in the 1960s.

Passenger operations at MSY were all based from hangers adjacent to the runways in the 1950s. As part of his goal of making New Orleans a gateway to Central and South America, Mayor Chep Morrison had a new terminal built, which opened in 1959. The main entrance/terminal, seen here in this 1960s photo, is the beginning of Concourse “C.” The official name of the airport was changed to New Orleans International Airport (Moisant Field), but the airport’s three-letter code remained MSY.

The present-day configuration of MSY shows its evolution from that 1959 main terminal. In an attempt to establish MSY as a potential “hub” for a major airline, Mayors Vic Schiro and Moon Landrieu made proposals to the state and federal governments to build a new airport, but these were ultimately turned down. The state decided to fund an expansion of the existing facility, and what are now Concourses “A” and “B” were built in the 1970s. During his tenure in office in the 1980s, Mayor Sidney Barthelemy tried once again to relocate MSY and build a “hub” airport, but his efforts were rejected. MSY was further expanded in the 1990s with the addition of Concourse “D.”

In 2001, the city renamed the airport after one of its favorite sons, changing the official name to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. In the photo above, “Satchmo” arrives at MSY for Carnival season 1965, and is greeted by past Kings and other officers of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club (of which he was King in 1947).

MSY received minimal damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The airport remained closed to all but military and humanitarian air traffic until September 13, 2005, when commercial flights to and from the city resumed. A band of winter thunderstorms spawned tornadoes in the early morning hours of February 3, 2006, one of which touched down on or near Concourse “C.” The damage was significant, and required months to fully repair.

Today, MSY continues to expand, both physically as well as in overall numbers of flights. Air Canada has returned to offer service to Toronto for the first time since the storm. New Orleans is now a significant port for several leisure cruise lines, so naturally MSY traffic has increased as cruise-goers fly into the city, spending a night or two before they ship out or after they return home.

It’s not quite the same to fly from O’Hare International (ORD) in Chicago than it is to take the Panama Limited, and coming into MSY from Hartsfield-Jackson (ATL) in Atlanta is nothing compared to the Crescent Limited, but the routes still lead home.

What’s your air-travel route when you’re “Flying to New Orleans?” Share it with us in the comments section below.

Tagged as: airplane, airport, Christmas travel, GoNOLA, History, home for the holidays, Lakefront, Louis Armstrong, MSY, New Orleans, New Orleans airport