LGA ATADS data, 1991-2014:
Scrollable aerial view at bing.com. (Click to open in a new window).
Airport Narrative (Overview & History)
This airport opened for commercial service in 1939, five years after New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia landed at Newark and refused to disembark, because his ticket said ‘New York’. His act of civil disobedience worked, as he was then flown to Bennett Field and initiated the campaign to open New York City’s first airport. The airport is managed by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, which has a nice slideshow of airport history.
KLGA has roughly 500 daily departures. Flights are limited by a ‘perimeter rule’, such that commercial destinations are all within 1,500 miles (though there are a few exceptions, such as Denver at ~1,600-miles) and there are no commercial flights to/from international destinations (other than eastern Canada). The airlines are pushing for an end to the perimeter rule, and if this happens, they will add more flights, including to the Delta/Northwest hub in Salt Lake City and to the West Coast.
Needless to say, the densely populated NYC area ensures this airport has a substantial impact on airport neighbors. That said, the impact is greatly magnified by FAA’s regulatory capture. The federal authority responsible for aviation in the U.S. is increasingly ‘collaborating’ behind closed doors with so-called ‘stakeholders’ to enable new routes, procedures and expansions, all designed to benefit the airlines, many times at great cost to other, non-stakeholders, such as airport neighbors. For example, although the basic NextGen technologies have been around a while, up until a few years ago, FAA was environmentally constrained from creating new impactful routes. It was not until early 2012 that FAA and the airlines got Congress to add ambiguous language that allows Categorical Exemptions (CATEXs). FAA is liberally applying the CATEX, creating routes in and out of KLGA with zero environmental review. The result is focused flight tracks, particularly the TNNIS departure, which are destroying neighborhoods in Flushing and elsewhere.