If you’re a frequent flyer in and out of New York there’ll be one name that fills
you with dread: LaGuardia.
Despite being a gateway to America’s biggest city, LaGuardia’s reputation was, well …
Well, if you didn't know anything about LaGuardia Airport and you showed up at Terminal B, you
would probably be confused.
The airport was extremely tight, extremely dense.
Even the Check-In areas were kind of odd and didn't represent what a typical American airport
look like.
With that in mind you might be surprised to learn that the airport now looks like this.
Work has just finished on the first phase of the USD $8BN project to rebuild LaGuardia,
but with so many challenges will this revamp really be enough to save New York’s most
hated airport?
It was back in 1935 that New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia ordered the construction of an
airport to give the city a more centrally located terminal.
It proved such a success that in 1964 a new building, the now infamous Terminal B, was
built to meet demand.
But as the volume of flights and the size of aircraft continued to grow LaGuardia failed
to keep up, despite the addition of two further terminals.
And it began to rank at the bottom of league tables for customer satisfaction and delays
on a pretty regular basis.
I think really in the 80s and 90s is when the airport really started to show its age.
And one of the reasons for that was the introduction of larger jets into LaGuardia Airport and
the fact that more and more passengers needed to go through the airport on very large airplanes.
Queues for check-in often snaked out of the front door, and modern security created bottlenecks
in the already undersized structure.
Corridors and waiting areas were overcrowded, with low ceilings that added to the feeling
of congestion – and then, to cap everything off, the food was awful.
If you have high expectations when it comes to food, you could not have brought those
high expectations with you to LaGuardia Airport.
You'd find a lot of fast foods at the airport.
You'd find a lot of quick bites in a very unpleasant atmosphere.
Almost like a rundown convenience store
In 2015 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a bold plan to rebuild the airport.
The dreaded terminal B would be completely reconstructed in a USD $4BN project.
Transport connections would also be improved, creating quicker access to the nearby Grand
Central Parkway and new public transport services.
In a separate phase, USD $3.9BN is being spent to rebuild the two Delta-owned terminals,
C and D, as one structure.
Terminal B opened in January 2022 and the transformation was pretty dramatic.
It's different than other airports in the United States, it's not this large box.
You do feel kind of a sense of cosiness along with it because it's on different levels,
and that's a unique experience for an airport but it's very New Yorky because in New York
there is no space so you do build up.
The original terminal had a large headhouse with four fingers emanating from it where
planes would park.
It was innovative for its day but the design created dead ends where no planes could park,
meaning some passengers had to walk further.
The layout also caused problems as the planes departed for the runways.
They’d have to be towed far enough away from the headhouse before they could start
taxiing to avoid the thrust from their engines causing damage to the building.
That led to a less than efficient airfield.
The new terminal turns everything on its head and switches to a satellite configuration.
There are now two satellite concourses joined to the headhouse by sky bridges and planes
can pass underneath.
But anyone who knows La Guardia will realise that it’s gonna take more than one new terminal
to solve this airport’s problems.
Many of its challenges are somewhat baked-in, and stem from what first made LaGuardia an
attractive spot for an airfield back in the 1930s.
With a sea border on two of its sides, LaGuardia is also hemmed in by the Grand Central Parkway
to its south, and that all rules out any kind of serious expansion, short of a land reclamation
project.
It’s also hampered by its runway arrangement.
This intersection here effectively guarantees the two runways can’t be used at the same
time.
When LaGuardia Airport is in a particular configuration.
For example, landing on runway three one, departing on runway four, the queue for departures
is very, very long because of the intersecting runways, and we don't always know if the arrival
is going to go through the intersection before they can clear the runway.
That makes the queue very, very long and windy around the terminal area, and it's been in
situations like that where there's a delay getting out of the ramp.
A long taxi queue to the runway where I've actually missed my connecting flight and my
next airport.
In 2017 New York’s then-mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled plans to close the prison on Rikers
Island and redevelop the site as a third runway for LaGuardia - the idea was to increase capacity
at the airport by an exciting 40 percent.
But again location threw a spanner in the works.
LaGuardia sits in some of the busiest airspace in the world - JFK, Teterboro and Newark are
all in the area and the skies above this city see some 3,000 flights a day.
Adding another runway wouldn’t exactly do much to cut congestion in the air so the Rikers
Island plans were quietly dropped.
Aside from the issues at the airport itself, just getting there has always been a bit of
a nightmare.
The proposed ferry terminal was dropped during construction and another key link has since
been derailed.
There was some promise in the AirTrain LaGuardia – a two and a half kilometre elevated railway
which would have plugged into the New York Subway and Long Island Railroad at Willets
Point.
But that idea was also shelved after it came under heavy criticism in Queens by residents
who opposed the destruction it could cause to their neighbourhoods and others who argued
for a more direct link to Manhattan.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport, has now gone back
to the drawing board but in all honesty it’s hard to see a simple or affordable solution.
In many ways LaGuardia is a victim of its own success and may always struggle with its
most intractable problems.
Nevertheless the new Terminal B is a triumph of design and construction and will make a
degree of difference.
So I definitely see two improvements with the new LaGuardia.
The first one, of course, is yes, it is a nicer place to wait for your flight, just
look at the terminal it's absolutely gorgeous.
But the second improvement is the ramp itself, and that's something that a lot of travellers
may not recognize.
But there's enough room now to put two aircraft on the ramp at the same time, and that is
definitely going to improve operational efficiency.
I think that there's going to be less situations where you sit at the gate and you need to
wait for the aircraft behind you because they're blocking the ramp because the tug is being
removed.
I think that there's going to be more opportunity now for those aircraft to be placed in a different
location so that the aircraft at the gate can officially push back and go right to the
taxiway.
The teams who build these entirely new airports while keeping existing ones fully operational
are testament to the skill of the construction sector.
The new terminals at LaGuardia are steadily being transformed from the butt of a bad joke
into world class airport facilities – but will that be enough to give people renewed
faith in LaGuardia or will it end up as a slightly nicer place to hurry up and wait?
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