Heavy rain and dangerous flash flooding delayed and canceled flights on Friday at La Guardia and Kennedy Airports, with the number of grounded flights also mounting at other airports in the Northeast. Wait times crept up to nearly an hour at Newark Liberty International Airport and Boston Logan International Airport.
At Kennedy, the average delay for outbound flights is more than three hours. And the extreme weather hasn’t just kept flights on the ground. At La Guardia, floodwaters began rising in Terminal A, forcing it to close. Terminal A handles, on average, fewer than 10 percent of La Guardia’s flights, said Amanda Kwan, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the area’s airports.
The diminished operations at the area’s airports are not more pronounced then they would be on a typical stormy day, said Ian Petchenik, a spokesman for Flightradar24, a flight-tracking company. But this could change if flights are grounded for a prolonged period, he said.
The airspace in and around metro New York is the busiest and most complex in the country, according to the Port Authority. About 30 percent of flights in the United States pass through New York area airports at some point each day, Mr. Petchenik said.
Passengers can expect “rippling impact and cancellations through the rest of today,” said Michael McCormick, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and a former control tower operator for the Federal Aviation Administration.
“The adage is, the way New York goes, so does the system,” he added.
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