Shun Graves
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
(TNS)

MASCOUTAH — Nathan Bryant lives less than 10 minutes from an airport. For a recent vacation, he drove 150 miles to a different one.

Flying out of his hometown airport in Peoria, Illinois, would have required connecting flights to get to Gulf Shores, Alabama. Enough of that, he thought. There had to be another way.

And so he discovered MidAmerica St. Louis Airport.

“The ease of being here? Oh my God,” he said as he waited for his flight. “This is just as easy, if not easier, than Peoria.”

He’s one of the many travelers fueling a boom at the airport nestled in cornfields on the eastern fringes of the St. Louis area. In 2025 the airport handled the most boardings in its history, in a 26% jump over the previous year. It will likely hit a new high this year.

It’s a striking turnaround for an airport long lampooned by critics as the “Gateway to Nowhere.” After years of failing to secure steady passenger flights, the airport used taxpayer funding to try out other uses, including receiving a weekly cargo shipment of flowers from South America.

Over the past decade, low-cost carrier Allegiant Air has slowly established a niche between MidAmerica and Southern beach destinations, most in Florida.

Airport Director Darren James, in the job since 2023, has started to dream about flights to Mexico.

“What business initially has people just flooding through their doors when they open up?" he said. “We had to find our way. And we eventually did.”

Success at last?

The epithets quickly piled up after the airport terminal opened for service in 1998 with no regular passenger flights.

Regional planners had envisioned MidAmerica as a secondary airport that could relieve congestion at St. Louis Lambert International Airport, then the global hub of TWA. It opened as a joint-use facility with the adjacent Scott Air Force Base.

News coverage at the time described the project as a white elephant, a $300 million boondoggle. “If you build it, they may not come,” the Chicago Tribune wrote. “Fleecing of America,” cried NBC News.

St. Clair County, which pushed for MidAmerica and continues to subsidize the airport today, estimated that the terminal could serve more than a million passengers annually within two years, by 2000.

Yet the airport failed to attract an airline until 2000, when a resurrected Pan American Airways showed up. The first flight departed for Gary/Chicago Airport in Indiana, itself another small “reliever” airport. The Pan Am service didn’t last.

Two other airlines — Great Plains and TransMeridian — followed and went bankrupt. Allegiant made its first go at MidAmerica during this time, but it quit in 2009.

The airport had zero regular passenger flights, once again.

Attempts to attract cargo business didn’t take off, either. MidAmerica built a $7 million cargo facility in 2005. Its first regular customer came in 2008 with the weekly flower delivery from Colombia. The flower flights lasted about two years.

Two other initiatives have proved more fruitful. Boeing ended up taking over the cargo facility and turning it into a manufacturing plant. Meanwhile, in 2012 the airport opened a distribution center for fresh produce.

Allegiant returned to MidAmerica that same year. The low-cost carrier started with twice-weekly flights to Orlando.

The number of destinations and passengers grew, peaking at 152,900 boardings in 2019. Then came the pandemic, which depressed demand, but only at first.

“Leisure travel was the first thing to rebound,” said James, the airport director. “And this airport, actually, rebounded before the levels of service at an airport like Lambert returned.”

MidAmerica saw 160,000 boardings in 2021. The figure inched up the following year and then dipped to around 150,000 in 2023 and in 2024.

It shot upward to 192,000 in 2025. MidAmerica is poised to beat that record, as the counts for the first four months of 2026 surpassed those from the same month last year, according to the latest data available from the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Still, the airport operates at a deficit. St. Clair County continues to subsidize its operation, spending nearly $15 million in 2024, according to the most recent county audit.

MidAmerica's boom, however, comes from leisure travelers, not the business traffic that planners once hoped would spill over from Lambert to MidAmerica. Allegiant’s service to vacation destinations does not legitimize the cost and justifications for building the airport in the first place, said Michael Boyd, a longtime MidAmerica naysayer who runs a global aviation consultancy.

MidAmerica serves a miniscule number of passengers compared to Lambert, which itself shrank after American Airlines acquired TWA and eventually shuttered its hub there.

Boyd views MidAmerica as a relic from a “sad period in airport planning” that, hundreds of millions of dollars later, still has not worked as intended.

“They don’t go after core traffic demand,” he said.

Allegiant didn't respond to interview requests.

Dreams of growth

Bryant, the vacation traveler, picked MidAmerica for two reasons: the price of a ticket and the ease of travel. Allegiant also flies from Peoria but not to Gulf Shores.

Even before he boarded the plane, he said he would “for sure” use MidAmerica again. “Zero stress from the moment we walked in to the moment we got up here,” he added.

Next to him sat his three sons, and for the two younger ones it would be their first time on a plane.

Elsewhere in the terminal, Shannon Mosher, of Springfield, Illinois, also waited for the flight to Gulf Shores. With only part of her family, though, because her husband and one of her sons drove all the way.

For her the calculus was simple.

“I wasn’t sitting in a car for 12 hours,” she said.

The Allegiant formula of cheap, nonstop flights to leisure hotspots has helped MidAmerica lure passengers from beyond the St. Louis area. The airport has benefited from some name recognition across downstate Illinois: Mosher, for one, learned about MidAmerica because she knew people who’d used it.

Today, Allegiant serves 11 destinations, most a few times a week, according to flight schedules. It has daily service — with more than one flight on some days — to Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport in Florida.

The growth has gotten James, the airport director, thinking about what could come next. He envisions another budget carrier like Frontier Airlines or Breeze Airways taking flight. And getting even a few airplanes and crews, probably Allegiant’s, based at MidAmerica would boost capacity by 50%, he thinks.

One selling point: The cost to an airline for each boarding passenger at MidAmerica is $1. Though that price tag compares favorably to airports like Lambert, the odds remain long for MidAmerica to attract a base or another airline, said Brett Snyder, who runs the industry website Cranky Flier.

MidAmerica’s location in a sparsely populated corner of the Metro East, itself the less-dense side of the St. Louis region, makes it a harder pitch for other budget carriers.

“It’s a great airport for Allegiant,” he said. “I think it is a really tough sell for other airlines to go in there.”

While it waits for additional service, the airport has already forged ahead on expanding its facilities. It doubled the size of its terminal in 2023 with a $34 million expansion. And an under-construction customs facility would enable MidAmerica to get international flights. To Mexico, James hopes.

The airport has also added some unusual amenities.

MidAmerica recently added bike racks after a paved trail from the Shiloh-Scott MetroLink station opened in June. Though the trail doesn’t extend all the way to the terminal entrance, it gets close enough that people can walk and cycle there. A sign in front of the terminal warns cyclists to walk their bicycles.

MetroLink itself will extend from Shiloh-Scott to MidAmerica later this year. That would allow people to take the train to both St. Louis-area commercial airports. The rail, road and trail project cost $190 million in state and local money.

Visitors to the airport, whether on two wheels or via the train, can buy snacks from the post-security shop without having to go through security. A small window on the lobby’s second floor has a secure mechanism called a sallyport; ring the bell, and the clerk on the other side will assist you.

“It’s easy to look backward,” James said. “I’m not spending time looking backward. I’m looking forward to see where we can take the airport and what kind of benefit it can bring to St. Clair County.”

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