New York-area airspace, the most congested in the United States, will be redesigned to reduce airline delays 20 percent by 2011, the Federal Aviation Administration said yesterday.
New procedures and routes will make air travel more efficient in five states, Nancy Kalinowski, an FAA director, said. She noted the changes will aid travelers at Liberty International Airport in Newark, and LaGuardia and Kennedy in Queens - the nation's three most congested airports.
"This design will benefit the flying public by cutting down on delays," Kalinowski said on a conference call in Washington.
The announcement caps a decade of FAA research aimed at increasing on-time arrivals and minimizing noise. The airspace includes Delaware and Connecticut, as well as the Philadelphia area.
The three metropolitan-area airports lead the nation in late-arriving airline flights through the first seven months of the year, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The plan, parts of which will be implemented in the coming months, will shave a combined 12 million minutes of delay per year from those three airports and Philadelphia's, Kalinowski said.
The airspace redesign will also reduce carrier fuel and other operating costs by $248million a year, according to the FAA.
Only 57 percent of flights have arrived on time at Newark's Liberty Airport this year, according to statistics bureau figures released yesterday. LaGuardia had the second-worst U.S. rate, at 58.6 percent, followed by Kennedy Airport at 59.1 percent. The bureau considers a flight delayed if it arrives beyond 15 minutes of the scheduled time.
