The New KCI: A Review

PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 2023

“For years, the naysayers put up a big fight against a new airport terminal in Kansas City, Missouri,” TPG’s Zach Griff gushes in his guide to the new KCI. “They liked the convenience of the original facility, which offered the ability to park and practically walk onto the plane.” Yeah, Zach, they kind of did like that convenience. Why wouldn’t they?

“The opposition was strong,” Zach continues, “but Justin Meyer, the city’s deputy director of aviation, kept his head held high.” Not to bring Justin low, but he needs to know that when Kansas City travelers arrive at KCI, their first instinct is to gripe. The opposition has not abated.

Unlike visitors, we see the airport through taxpayers’ eyes. We knew what we had. To the degree possible, we wanted to preserve that special sauce at some reasonable cost. But what “we” wanted and what “they” wanted never meshed.

Zach tells us we will be “mesmerized by the 28 unique art installations,” but “bamboozled,” I think, is a little closer to the mark. The fact that KCI represents the “largest-ever public art program in Kansas City’s history” just twists the knife. I can imagine many better ways to spend that $15 million or so taxpayer dollars.

Where to Begin?

For starters, maybe with a couple of extra TSA booths. My last two flights left KCI early in the morning, one at 6, one at 7. What they had in common was the length of the queue. Each lasted a full half-hour. In the future, I will always have to slice that much time out of my sleep.

In the old KCI, “each small subset of gates had its own security checkpoint,” Zach tells us, “which often experienced bottlenecks.” Those were some tiny bottles. I don’t recall ever waiting in line more than five or 10 minutes, and I fly a lot. 

To distract us from the meandering queue and frequent time checks, we are invited to look up at Nick Cave’s million-dollar art installation, “The Air Up There”—in Zach’s words, “a plethora of colorful metal spinners that welcome you into the new space.” Color me a Philistine, Zach, but when I’m hustling to catch a flight, I wouldn’t care if the Mona Lisa were spinning from the roof. 

In mid-October, I arrived in the sparkling new KCI on a direct flight from Tampa at gate 68, the farthest gate from the front door. As I rounded the corner into the long straightaway, I noticed that the moving walkway was out of service. Curiously, the previous time I flew into KCI, the walkway was also out of service. Was this a bug, I asked myself, or an art installation I couldn’t quite understand?

On both of my last two arrivals, I fell in with a cluster of people, bonding in our self-pity. The defunct walkway having set us off, we bitched all way to the curb. Napoleon’s troops, I suspect, griped less in their long slog back from Moscow in the snow. Yes, we were spoiled. The old KCI had spoiled us.

“The new Kansas City terminal was also designed with accessibility in mind,” Zach tells us. “If you’re dropped off at the departures level, you won’t need to take any stairs or elevators to get to your gate. There’s just one small sloping ramp that leads to each concourse, but it’s a very mild grade.”

A mild grade maybe, but it’s a very long walk. A friend visiting Kansas City last month found herself in a pickle. With a broken foot, the walk from her gate to the curb exhausted her. On the trip out, she felt obliged to request a wheelchair. It was embarrassing. She had never done that before.

She was not alone. Others have made the same decision. On my last trip, a veritable convoy of wheel chairs descended on my gate. Watching these people board before me, I found myself thinking, “Hmmm … maybe, I need to get in on this.” 

Among the features the airport brass are proudest of are the “all-gender” bathrooms. They are so proud, in fact, that they placed one at the intersection of the straightaway and the B concourse. With the “gender specific” bathrooms located towards the end of the B concourse, the all-gender loo gets more natural traffic.

My wife tried it. She disliked everything about it, beginning with the ideology that inspired such an expensive fix. For whatever reason, the stalls take up much more space than in a ladies’ room, and, for privacy’s sake, the doors extend to the floor. Then, too, there were the pee-stained seats. Historically, I am told, that has not been the norm in ladies’ rooms. 

The (Limited) Bright Side …

Yes, of course, there are improvements. Towards the end, the old terminal had all the musty charm of a backwater Greyhound station. The seats are better at the new KCI, the outlets more plentiful, the snack choices more abundant, the waiting areas brighter and more spacious, and, for my purposes, the Park Air Express bus arrives at one designated, covered spot.

Yet these gains do not compensate for the losses in time and convenience, and I have not even addressed the difficulty of picking someone up. Unless my plane is delayed, I cannot see myself ever eating at one of the many new restaurants or shopping at the new shops. Having paid for them, I hope someone will.

The sad disconnect is that the designers did not build the new airport for the people who live here. They built it for people who don’t. Insecure about our own identity, we wanted to show visitors we could have an airport just as glitzy and inconvenient as theirs.

One major puzzle, though: Given the need to impress, given all the attention to art and inclusivity, how is it that we ended up with an airport that looks like a parking garage? Riddle me that, Batman!