Wheels Up at KCI

When watching older movies, I pay particular attention to airport scenes. My prime focus is the suitcase. My goal is to discern how many years after we first put a man on the moon, did we put wheels on a suitcase. I bring this up to observe that it is the roller bag that makes the new KCI viable, the four-wheeler in particular.

I fly almost monthly. My usual gate is at the far end of the most distant concourse, perhaps a half-mile from the entrance. At the old KCI, of course, the gate was never more than 100 yards from an entrance, but the four-wheeler negates that advantage. I don’t have to pull it, let alone carry it. It accompanies me.

Once I became fixated on the evolution of the roller bag—they became commonplace about 30 years after Apollo XI—I started projecting their absence onto historical events. Sad but true: In watching a movie about people fleeing Paris in advance of the Nazis, suitcases in hand, I found myself thinking, ‘If only the French had roller bags.” 

In the face of such distance, more than a few travelers opt for a wheelchair. It has become a popular option. Sometimes the chairs arrive at the gate in convoys. For many, a wheelchair is essential. For others, it’s a political statement, a way of putting something over on The Man. 

On my most recent flight, a fashionably dressed young woman rolled up to the gate and hopped out of the chair as if she had just flown in from Lourdes. Her Cheshire Cat grin said to the rest of us, “Suckers.”

For me, the new KCI has two distinct advantages. One is the restaurants. Given the uncertainties of crossing the Missouri River during rush hour, I can now leave early for an evening flight and eat at the airport. Admittedly, it’s airport food at airport prices, but the service, if at times a little gruff, is good. True, all the servers have ample tattoos, and you know they would rather be someplace else—one, in particular, in the all-gender restroom—but they respect your time.

In my many driving trips across the country, I have formulated my Mickey D’s theory of service—the farther a McDonald’s is from a city, the friendlier the service. Given KCI’s distance from Kansas City, the Mickey D factor filters down to the TSA staff. To test my theory, try flying out of Newark.

Unfortunately, the airport has rejected the one fast food establishment that defies my Mickey D theory. I refer here, of course, to Chick-fil-A. Last summer, I tested my theory at a Chick-fil-A in America’s worst city—Camden, New Jersey. Yet, even in Camden, the staff were uniformly chirpy and helpful. Chick-fil-A culture overrode the culture of the surrounding city.

Unfortunately, there was something about Chick-fil-A culture that alarmed the pressure groups dictating airport amenities. Yielding to that pressure, airport honchos booted Chick-fil-A from their lineup. The airport, alas, has gone astray each time it sacrificed function for some larger cause. 

Yes, even when that cause is art, case in point Nick Cave’s million-dollar art installation, “The Air Up There.” Airport promoters described Cave’s handiwork as “a plethora of colorful metal spinners that welcome you into the new space.” What the spinners reminded me of was the plethora of my tax dollars being used to no functional end other than to distract me from the long TSA lines.

This problem solved itself. In October 2024, one of the colorful 2,800 spinners took leave from the air up there and crashed resoundingly to earth. Fortunately, no one was injured. At who-knows-what expense, airport officials took down the remaining 2,799 spinners and had the installation inspected.

What the inspectors concluded was that if the work was reinstalled without major modification, there was no guarantee other spinners wouldn’t fly off and send some unfortunate soul—or his heirs—to the nearest trial lawyer. 

The engineers’ report traced the failure to a clip of the sort that fishermen use to connect lures. Multiply that design flaw by 2,800, and you have a million-dollar fiasco. This alleged “fan favorite” was promptly decommissioned. 

I have heard no one complain about its absence.

One other design flaw has not solved itself, but some hustling class-action lawyer may do the solving for us. The inherent flaw of the all-gender restroom concept became abundantly clear in March when KCI Airport Police arrested restaurant worker Teriosi Ludwig for felony invasion of privacy.

Ludwig’s perversion was powerfully addictive. On as many as 66 occasions, according to authorities, he followed women into the bathroom and from an adjoining stall slipped his cell phone under the partition to record his victims as they took care of business. Yuck! 

As with the expulsion of Chick-fil-A, the inclusion of an all-gender bathroom was ideologically driven. It never made sense. Just as no one ever washes a rental car, comparatively few men will practice proper bathroom hygiene without a wife to yell at them.

In that the single-gender bathrooms are at the end of a concourse, the all-gender bathroom is the first one most arriving passengers see and, under duress, use. My wife hates them. More than once, she has sent a city official an image of the pee puddle that greeted her upon entering a stall.

The simplest fix here would be to extend the partitions to the floor. The real fix would be to make the all-gender bathroom a ladies’ room. Real men should be expected to hold it in.

OK, now for the second real advantage. The bus to my car park only has to make one stop, and that stop is well marked and shielded from the elements. This may seem like a minor perk, but when you arrive at 1 a.m. after a lengthy flight delay, it matters in a way that a colorful metal spinner never could. 

The simplest fix is almost always the best.

PUBLISHED APRIL 2026