Air Nutmeg
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Some Connecticut residents are reportedly up in arms over a proposal to re-route some traffic into La Guardia Airport over their neighborhoods, but flying New Yorkers can’t put up with such Nutmeg State scruples for much longer. The caterwauling comes as the Federal Aviation Administration is evaluating proposals to redesign the airspace in the New York-New Jersey-Philadelphia region. Any air traveler who cares about reducing delays has a dog in this flight, er, fight.
The FAA is in the eighth year of its project to redesign flight patterns into La Guardia and John F. Kennedy airports in New York, Newark Liberty International in New Jersey, and Philadelphia International in Pennsylvania. Because the four are so close together, juggling traffic around them has always been a challenge. It has gotten harder as airline schedules have expanded and newer models of airplanes have arrived. Increasing small-craft traffic to and from other airports in the region, including all the private jets flying out of Teterboro, have compounded the problem. The four major airports now regularly pop up on lists of the 10 most congested and delay-prone airports in America, and the delays have a ripple effect across the country and around the world.
Most of the problems relate to air-traffic control. The airspace design, which regulates approach and departure paths, separation distances between aircraft, and acceptable altitudes, hasn’t been changed since the 1960s. At commercial airports like La Guardia, planes have to change altitude in steps instead of being able to do so in a continuous path, and each step change ties up a radio frequency and a controller’s attention. Airspace is divided between airports in a way that doesn’t account for today’s differences in traffic levels, creating logjams and consuming extra time from controllers. Smaller planes operating to and from satellite airports have to navigate between and below all these convoluted flight paths, creating even more inefficiencies for fliers and, yet again, headaches for controllers.
What this means for average fliers is delays. Hopping on a flight to Washington? One has to compete for airspace with flights to California. Bad weather? Controllers have limited or no options for re-routing flights in and out of the area. Flying in or out during a peak period? One may be stuck at the end of the line in a crowded arrival or departure corridor while luckier passengers at a different area airport sail through under-utilized airspace.
The only real solution is to overhaul the paths of planes into and out of the area, which is going to mean some people will discover themselves under a new flight path. We’re sympathetic to their plight; some of the editors of these columns have lived under airport approaches. New York travelers, however, can’t afford not to make the change, especially when the Connecticut complainers are unhappy about an option that would direct the planes over their counties at relatively high altitudes and would feature descent paths designed to reduce noise. The FAA is still reviewing its options and it may yet decide to scotch the Connecticut approach path in favor of one of the four other alternatives on the table. New Yorkers will hope that whatever the FAA decides, it does so based on what’s best for passengers at these airports instead of Nutmeg NIMBYism.