The tornado that ripped through downtown Atlanta on Friday night, damaging parts of the CNN Center and the Georgia Dome, spared the city’s two general aviation airports.
“We dodged the bullet,” Doug Barrett, manager of Fulton County Airport, told AVweb. The airport is located about eight miles west-northwest of where the tornado touched down and received some pea-sized hail, Barrett said. Dekalb-Peachtree Airport, located about 10 miles northeast of the tornado’s path, was also unscathed, according to airport manager Lee Remmel. There were no media reports of damage at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Severe thunderstorms rumbled through the southern states over the weekend, spawning multiple twisters and leaving two dead in northern Georgia. Lans Rothfusz of the National Weather Service told CNN that the tornado that hit downtown Atlanta measured an EF-2 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, with peak winds of 130 miles per hour.
