St. Louis Lambert International Airport will close a runway on Sunday, April 15, to make way for a day-long event to raise money for Special Olympics Missouri.
The "STL Day on the Runway" will include a 5K race, a walk, a family festival with food vendors and trucks, games and entertainment and a "plane pull" in which teams compete to tug a plane a specified distance in the least amount of time.
The event will be held on and near Lambert's westernmost runway 11-29 which opened in 2006. More details will be announced at a news conference Thursday.
The event is part of the Law Enforcement Torch Run for the Special Olympics, a year-round campaign to aid the organization providing sports training and competition for children and adults with intellectual disabilities.
Stacey Koeller, a Special Olympics official, said Tuesday that her organization held "plane pulls" at Spirit of St. Louis Airport in Chesterfield from 1999 to 2009 but this would be the first one at Lambert.
She said the Spirit events didn't include the family festival. Special Olympics groups in other parts of the country have held similar events at airports, including O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.
The St. Louis Airport Commission in November approved issuing a permit for the activity.
"We've never done a project like this," Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge, Lambert's director, said then. "We think it's time to step forward."
Airport officials said Lambert's airlines have been supportive of the event and no flights will have to be canceled.
The permit also allows the runway to be closed if needed April 14 — the day before the event — for set-up purposes.