STL — A Strange Place for a Layover

I recently had a layover at the E concourse of terminal 2 of the St. Louis Lambert International Airport, and I have to say, it was an interesting experience.

“It Belongs in a Museum!”

The first odd thing I noticed was while walking between the gates – a wall of empty newspaper vending machines, with a potted plant sitting in front of part of the display.

Upon arriving at my gate, E38, I soon noticed there was a moving sidewalk to…nowhere.

The sidewalk wasn’t turned on, and clearly it never was, as they were storing wheelchairs at either end. By the time my flight was boarding, a small army of the wheeled creatures had amassed by the sidewalk:

The keen-eyed among you may have noticed that the ceiling appears to be exposed. It is!

Judging by the paint job on most of the infrastructure, I believe this is an intentional design choice, but the unpainted cable raceway certainly sticks out like a sore thumb. If they meant to have a drop ceiling, it would have looked more like this:

(Photos were taken at the E concourse of Charlotte Douglas International Airport, which was being renovated at the time.)

Laughably Outdated Wi-Fi

Aesthetics aside, the wi-fi situation was also quite annoying. Upon connecting, I was greeted by a captive portal revealing that not only is their free wi-fi slow, it’s time-limited:

It was at this point that I started wondering if I had traveled back to the late 2000s, because that is probably the last time I’ve encountered a timed free tier.

I really have to wonder how much business this drums up for the airport, because from my perspective, this isn’t much of a carrot:

• You used to have to root most phones to tether them (or at least not have it billed at exorbitant rates), but this hasn’t been the case for quite some time; today, anyone can fire up a hotspot to get their non-cellular devices online with reasonable confidence they won’t rack up a massive bill.
• The airport isn’t exactly a cellular dead-zone, like, say, the basement of the Baltimore Convention Center, where you have a captive audience.
  • Cellular data also isn’t exactly slow and unreliable like it used to be, either.
• “Up to” 10 Mbps and 20 Mbps are pathetic. If I’m going to pay for wi-fi, if it’s not in-flight (where you actually have limited bandwidth), I expect at least 200 Mbps¹.
  • Power users who would pay are likely to just fire up their phone’s hotspot as a result, as their cellular service is likely faster than the paid tiers.

By comparison:

• BWI: One tier, the free tier (I’ve seen it hit 100 Mbps down/150 up), and it’s free forever, no ads.
• CLT: One tier, the free tier (I’ve seen it hit 50 Mbps down/25 up), and it’s free forever, no ads.
• LAX: Same pricing tiers, unlisted (but likely the same) speed tiers, but the free tier has no timer.
• MDW: Same pricing tiers, but there’s no speed boost for paying (I’ve seen it hit 200 Mbps down/200 up), and the free tier has no timer.
• ORD: Same pricing tiers, same paid speed tiers as STL, but the free tier is both unlimited and faster at 7 Mbps.
  • Why MDW and ORD, despite both being operated by the Chicago Department of Aviation, have such different wi-fi tiers remains a mystery.
• RDU: One tier, the free tier, free forever, though you do have to watch an ad first. I do not remember the speeds, but they weren’t good or bad enough to be particularly memorable.

Sidenote/LPT: The time limit is trivial to bypass

If you’re ever stuck in STL or another venue with a time limit on the free wi-fi, all you have to do to extend your time without paying is change your MAC address. Without a proper device authentication protocol like 802.1X or even just generating a unique PSK for every user (both of which would just create more headache than it’s worth for the administrators of these public networks), captive portal systems have to rely on MAC addresses.

I do not have an iPhone, but at least on Android, you can use the privacy MAC address feature to change the MAC address your device presents to the wi-fi network:

1. Open the wi-fi settings.
2. Go to the settings for the time-limited network in question.
3. Tap on “Privacy”.
4. In the modal that appears, tap “Use device MAC”.
   1. This will disable the spoofed MAC address and use the default one that was burned into your wi-fi radio at the factory. Although you can just leave it here, you will have to perform the following steps eventually:
5. Re-open the privacy modal and tap “Use randomized MAC (default)”.
6. Your MAC address should now be re-randomized with a new value.
7. When prompted, go through the captive portal like normal.
8. Alternatively, forgetting and then re-connecting to the wi-fi network should also re-randomize it with a new value.

Of course, you have to do this every four hours, but it’s time well spent in my opinion.

This is what the modal looks like:

“Entertainment”

Back in the terminal, after getting annoyed at the existence of such a limited free wi-fi offering in 2024, I soon began looking around for information on my flight. Obviously, I can access that on my phone, but it’s nice not to have to put my book down² to open a browser or rely on text messages to know when boarding begins when I have noise-cancelling headphones on.

There were screens for E40 and E36 that were clearly visible from their respective seating areas, but for E38? You had to walk out to the non-seating area (is it still a hallway if the rooms have no walls?) for such a display. Sadly, I did not think to take a picture of this sad state of affairs, but I did take a picture of something even sadder: the one TV that people seated by E38 could easily view was playing TikTok compilations, courtesy of a service called ReachTV.

What is ReachTV? Well, in their own words³:

As America’s largest in-airport tv network, reachtv shares authentic stories with the tastemakers of the world. People who are on the go, in the know and hungry for content.

(I didn’t modify the quote, they butchered the capitalization of their company name on their own homepage³.)

I don’t know what kind of arrangement ReachTV has with the content creators they feature, but I get the feeling they’re not exactly on the up-and-up, as, rather than show the original videos (which they could easily have gotten if they had proper business relationships in place), they just straight-up screen recorded TikTok, as shown by the like/comment/bookmark/share icons on every video. They couldn’t even be bothered to download the clips⁴.

It’s certainly possible that this was done on purpose to feel more “authentic”, but either way, I’m not a fan of displaying 9x16 filler content with giant black bars on a 16x9 screen that would be better suited to displaying flight information. If you’re going to put filler content on such a screen, at least move the 9x16 content to the side and put the flight information where there would be blank space! (They’d probably get more eyeballs if they had such an arrangement, so it’s surprising this opportunity hasn’t been capitalized on.)

But I digress.

The Bathroom Situation

When I went to use the bathroom (I didn’t take any pictures), I found that the marble wall tiles outside had been successful in deceiving me into expecting a far nicer experience than I actually got. The bathrooms weren’t gross, but they were in an obvious state of decay:

• The stall doors used to have those built-in locks you turn to close, as the holes for them were still there, despite having been extracted at some point because…
  • At some point, these internal locks were replaced with external locks, and either the contractor was truly the lowest bidder or they just buy whatever is cheapest when they break because the external locks were not consistent in their design (I saw 3 different styles during my time there).
• And they seem to have given up on maintaining the stall locks at some point, because it seemed like around a quarter of them had no lock whatsoever.
  • It’s a good thing there weren’t many people in the terminal, otherwise I would’ve had to choose between waiting in line and having privacy!
• Some of the sinks had working automated soap dispensers, with fixtures built into the counter, but most did not, and instead had free-standing dispensers that were likely intended to be temporary (a basic label and a translucent white plastic shell that looked like it was intended to be slotted into something else) but had become permanent.
  • A good chunk of the automatic dispensers were missing protective coverings, exposing their circuitry. Even with conformal coating, I don’t expect these would last long in that environment.

I’m not asking for BWI-tier bathrooms⁵, but come on, you can do better than this.

An Open-Air Market

The Hudson News by my gate was also quite remarkable because it was completely open-air:

(I meant to take a picture of this but it totally slipped my mind, so I found the closest picture I could on Google Maps⁶.)

Also quite interesting is the Dunkin’ Donuts stand beside it. It, too, is open air, but it was spotless – no donuts, no drinks, no cashier. I suspect it hasn’t been open in quite some time. Unfortunately, by the time I thought to take a picture of it, several Southwest Airlines pilots had commandeered it as a hang-out spot (and I didn’t want to ask them to move just so I could get a depressing photo of the abandoned hallway donut stand) so you’ll just have to imagine a lonely Hudson News in the middle of a hallway whose sole employee has run off to the bathroom beside an eerie, empty donut stand next to mostly-empty vending machines and a lone wheelchair by the non-moving moving sidewalk.

It would have been an iconic shot, if I had only thought to take it when I first arrived.

A Bygone Era

Of course, it’s clear E40 was never intended to be the end of terminal 2. There’s no reason to build a moving sidewalk at the end of a hallway unless you plan on building more, and the abrupt end with no real “cap” or final gate is actually a false ending:

It would appear they built out the infrastructure to bridge the two terminals with a whole slew of gates, but the demand that would take advantage of them quickly fell to the wayside after 9/11.

After steadily climbing throughout the 1990s, peaking at 30.5 million in 2000, passenger volumes consistently declined in the wake of 9/11, with the 2007/2008 global financial crisis (and American Airline’s subsequent closure of their STL hub) helping to keep demand low, bottoming out at 12.3 million passengers in 2010 before slowly starting to recover, at least until 2020⁷.

Passenger numbers bottomed out even harder at just 6.3 million in 2020, and as of the end of 2023, they still had not fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels (15.8 million in 2019 vs 14.8 million in 2023)⁷.

It seems like they just can’t win.

Apparently, airport officials have decided the writing is on the wall and are considering demolishing terminal 2 and merging everything into a single concourse⁸. It certainly makes sense, given the stagnant passenger volumes, and the fact that you cannot transfer between terminals without re-entering the TSA line⁹, which would make transferring into or out of Southwest (the primary tenant of terminal 2¹⁰) a nightmare¹¹.

Conclusion

Would I still fly into STL? It certainly wouldn’t be my first pick, especially if I had to transfer between airlines.

1. Why 200 Mbps? In the past, I would have said 100, but earlier this year, I connected to the CTA’s public wi-fi at Roosevelt station (Green/Orange/Red line) and got 219 Mbps down/3 up. That’s an impressive download speed, especially when you consider this was on an 802.11n network in the 2.4 GHz band using a single 20 MHz channel at 30% utilization (according to Ubiquiti’s WiFiman app). My phone was connected with 3x3 MIMO, and to say I was blown away would be an understatement. I have never seen a paid wi-fi offering boasting 200 Mbps, and the CTA just casually delivers that for free. ↩

2. I was reading The Court Dancer by Shin Kyung-Sook, a historical romance tale about an orphan who becomes a court dancer during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty and subsequently gets courted by a French diplomat. I found it on the dollar rack of a used bookstore, and it was a dollar well spent! Highly recommended. ↩

3. Home - ReachTV / Internet Archive / archive.today ↩ ↩²

4. There’s really no excuse for this when it’s a yt-dlp supported site… ↩

5. BWI has by far and away the best airport bathrooms I have ever used, and indeed the best bathroom experience I have ever had outside some expensive California wineries. Everything about them seems well-thought-out, from the toilet paper dispensers to the lights that turn red when a stall is occupied to the signs out front indicating how far to the next bathroom and how many stalls are available…much like how Buc-ees ruined every other gas station’s bathrooms for me, BWI has ruined every other airport’s bathrooms. ↩

6. Image borrowed from John E. Connerat. ↩

7. STL Historical Passenger Activity Since 1990 / Internet Archive (PDF) ↩ ↩²

8. KSDK - Proposed plan would get rid of Terminal 2 at St. Louis Lambert Airport / Internet Archive / archive.today ↩

9. Switching terminals for airport club access? - /r/StLouis - reddit / archive.today ↩

10. Airlines at STL - St. Louis Lambert International Airport / archive.today ↩

11. I expect that having separate terminals was much more bearable in a pre-9/11 world with its laxer security (terminal 2 opened in 1998). Even though it would still be annoying, transferring between them would be just an annoyance, rather than a liability. ↩