History
During World War II, Charleston's airport at that time, Wertz Field, closed when the airport's approaches were blocked once the federal government built a synthetic rubber plant next to the airport; this left the city without an airport. However, there were plans before the war to build a new Charleston airport, as Wertz Field was already becoming commercially obsolete.
The city started construction of its new airport in 1944; the facility opened in 1947 as Kanawha Airport. A terminal building was built in 1950 and was designed by Tucker & Silling. The airport received its current name in 1985, honoring then-Brigadier General Chuck Yeager, a native of nearby Lincoln County who piloted the world's first supersonic flight in the Bell X-1. In 1986, the terminal facilities were completely renovated. Concourse C, which was designed by L. Robert Kimball and Associates and cost $2.8 million, was completed in 2001, some three months ahead of schedule.
On February 27, 2008, Yeager's Governing Board voted to close the secondary runway, Rwy 15/33, to allow for the construction of two new hangars and additional ramp space for four additional C-130s to be based at the Air National Guard facility. It will allow the airport to triple the general aviation area's hangar space and create room for off-runway businesses, and provide parking for up to ten additional commercial airliners. 5 million dollars were given to the airport to build a canopy around the front of the terminal. Also, and additional 2 million have been given to create a covered walk-way from the main terminal to the airports parking garage.
Read more about this topic: Yeager Airport
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)