Spirit of St. Louis (KSUS)

Spirit of St. Louis is the region's business-aviation front door, a towered reliever in the Missouri River floodplain west of Lambert. Two close east-west parallels divide the work: a seventy-four-hundred-foot ILS runway for the corporate jets and a five-thousand-foot north strip for lighter traffic.

You work Spirit Tower beneath St. Louis Approach and the Class B shelf. There is no scheduled airline service: the radio is fractional callsigns, N-numbers, trainers and transient general aviation. West flow works the 26s and east flow the 8s, with the long south runway leading arrivals and the short north runway taking light departures and pattern work.

This is the Busy tier in small-tower form: less airline structure than a hub, but roughly four hundred real operations a day and enough VFR pattern traffic to keep both parallels alive.

Runway layout