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:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s history shall reveal itself. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of Old Europe.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)