N.Y. Airports Account for Half of All Delays – NYTimes.com

Delays are a fact of life at New York’s three main airports.

Each day, thousands of passengers are stuck on planes at the airports — Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark Liberty International — sitting in line behind a dozen other planes waiting to take off or circling overhead until they get clearance to land.

And the delays persist, despite changes in procedures and schedules by the airlines, airports and Federal Aviation Administration over the years. In the latest move, the F.A.A. last fall created new flight paths out of Kennedy to speed up departures. Even a significant drop in the number of flights since the economy slowed has not helped much. Flight delays last year in New York were as bad as they were five years ago.

In the first half of 2011, the region’s airspace — defined as the big three airports, plus Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, which caters to corporate jets, and Philadelphia International Airport — handled 12 percent of all domestic flights but accounted for nearly half of all delays in the nation. In the same period in 2005, they represented just a third of all delays, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

These delays ripple across the country. A third of all delays around the nation each year are caused, in some way, by the New York airports, according to the F.A.A. Or, as Paul McGraw, an operations expert with Airlines for America, the industry trade group, put it, “When New York sneezes, the rest of the national airspace catches a cold.”

via N.Y. Airports Account for Half of All Delays – NYTimes.com.

Strange Random Airport Quote:

That is the trouble with flying: We always have to return to airports. Thank of how much fun flying would be if we didn’t have to return to airports. — Henry Minizburg, Why I Hate Flying: Tales for the Tormented Traveler, 2001.

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Spain’s ghost airports: symbols of boom turned bust – Yahoo! News

Image by scottjlowe via Flickr

CIUDAD REAL, Spain – The glittering buildings rise up from Spain’s arid central plain. Draw closer and there’s something eerie about Ciudad Real‘s Central Airport. There’s hardly a plane in sight. Nobody’s around. Cars can only be heard faintly in the distance. This is one of Spain’s “ghost airports” — huge projects often funded by taxpayer money that helped drive Spain’s economic boom and now symbolize the wasteful spending that contributed to its spectacular bust. Envisioned three years ago as a satellite airport for congested Madrid, Central boasts one of Europe‘s longest runways, yet there’s hardly a skid-mark from the handful of weekly flights it now handles. Its vast and airy terminal, designed to handle 2.5 million passengers a year, echoes every sound.

via Spain’s ghost airports: symbols of boom turned bust – Yahoo! News.

Strange Random Ghost Quote:

Houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts. – Dean Koontz, Velocity

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