Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
This isn't true. Essentially everything at LGA but the two main runways and control tower is being rebuilt. LGA will have much higher capacity post-rebuild, and more gates. New parking, roadways, transit, hotel. And even the runways will function different, because of the new placement of the gates, which are now on the other side of the runways, which now run beneath the terminal. The runways cannot be expanded without a gauntlet of federal approvals, and the control tower is relatively new.
When I think "new airport" I think something built from scratch, on greenfield, so I don't like the term. But LGA, functionally, will be essentially entirely new.
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Ummm, it is true.
Laguardia will have the exact same capacity it does today. No gates are being added. The terminals are on the same side of the runways they were before, and the runways will function identically.
To put it simply, there is only one determining factor of Laguardia's current capacity: the number of aircraft that can land or take off per hour. Laguardia is one of a few airports nationwide that has maxed out the capacity of its runways (JFK and EWR are also among them).
By law, LGA is limited to 71 scheduled take offs and landings per hour, and 3 unscheduled ones. The airport's gates, taxiways, fuel infrastructure, it all could handle more flights, but it is impossible to operate more aircraft on the field safely.
These renovations do nothing to fix this. So those lineups of 12-15 aircraft waiting to take off, getting a random 45 minute delay because the weather turns, or the range limits on destinations aren't going to change. What will change are the habitability of the terminals, and less instances of waiting on the taxiway after landing for an aircraft to move out of your way to the gate. But the latter situation represents a tiny minority of delays at Laguardia.
This is why the LGA rebuild has been controversial among airport planners, because a lot of people have gotten extremely confused about what these improvements will actually accomplish. And it seems like some local politicians may have encouraged this, possibly because they want to avoid talking about the extremely controversial task of increasing capacity. But when it takes a minimum of 15 years to gain federal approval for a new runway, and airports in the region are already capacity constrained, kicking the can down the road really hurts things.
Mind you, no one thinks the new terminals are
bad. They are an improvement in every way over the old ones. The problem is that calling this a "new" airport dodges the issue of fixing the NYC area's acute aviation capacity problems.
40% of flight delays nationwide originate in the NYC metropolitan area(PDF, pg 10). All the way here in sunny San Diego, if my flight is delayed there's a better than even chance it's because my aircraft got held up trying to get in/out of NYC and that ruined its entire daily schedule.
Note though that if one were to plan on increasing airfield capacity in the NYC metro area, LGA probably wouldn't be the place to do it. Adding another runway to Newark or JFK would be more cost effective at reducing delays at all three airports.