Three letters on your flight plan: M-S-Y. The man they're named for had been a pilot for fifteen months.
A Pirep featured story · KMSY Louis Armstrong New Orleans International, New Orleans, LA
The three letters on your flight plan, MSY, stand for "Moisant Stock Yards."
The cattle pen they refer to was just west of New Orleans, on the edge of Kenner. On December 31, 1910, an Illinois-born aviator named John Bevins Moisant flew his Blériot XI monoplane over that stockyard at a hundred feet and got hit by a gust of wind. The plane up-ended. Moisant — who refused to wear a seatbelt — was ejected, fell into the pen, and died on the special train rushing him to Charity Hospital. He was forty-two. He had been a pilot for fifteen months.
In that fifteen months he had become world-famous.
Moisant was the son of French-Canadian immigrants who, before he ever sat in a cockpit, had made and lost a small fortune in El Salvador sugar and twice tried to overthrow the Salvadoran government. He watched the 1909 Reims air meet, enrolled in Louis Blériot's flying school in France, took four lessons, and bought his own airplane. In August 1910 he made the first cross-country passenger flight in history — Paris to London, carrying his mechanic and his tabby cat Paris-London in the cockpit. He designed and built the world's first all-metal airplane, an angular thing his Louisiana fans called L'Écrevisse, the crawfish.
In October 1910 he came to Belmont Park for the international meet. He crashed his Blériot on the ground while taxiing for the Statue of Liberty race, had it rebuilt in hours, and beat the British favorite Claude Grahame-White around the statue by 42.75 seconds. He was disqualified for starting late, but the press still called him the most daring aviator alive. Two months later he was in New Orleans for the Michelin Cup, a $4,000 prize for the longest unbroken flight. The Kenner crash happened on a preparatory hop, two days before the competition opened.
In 1946 New Orleans built its new airport a few miles from the stockyard and named it Moisant Field. At the dedication, Jimmy Doolittle unveiled the monument. It calls Moisant "a man of lovable character whose tragic death was a great loss to aviation." In 2001 the airport was renamed for Louis Armstrong. They kept the code. Every flight plan filed into MSY for the last seventy-eight years has carried the King of Aviators along with it.