LaGuardia Airport Runway Remains Closed Due to Sinkhole

One of LaGuardia Airport’s (LGA) two main runways remains closed on Friday, severely limiting flights during one of the year’s busier travel days.

Runway 4/22 has been out of service since Wednesday morning when a sinkhole was discovered near the tarmac during a routine airfield inspection. Emergency repair crews were immediately dispatched to the airport and the initial hope was that the runway would reopen by Thursday.

However, those plans have repeatedly changed, and officials are now targeting a reopening for Saturday morning at 6 a.m.

The issue, aside from the repair, is that another inspection with ground-penetrating radar found other areas of concern, which could mean the tarmac is unstable or there is shifting elsewhere along the runway. The crews now have to scan the whole area to make sure more sinkholes don’t open up.

With that runway closed, all commercial mainline, regional feeder, and shuttle traffic is being forced onto a single runway.

According to FlightAware, 20% of all scheduled flights into and out of LaGuardia have already been canceled today, with rolling delays climbing rapidly. FlightAware’s “Misery Map” also shows that the bottleneck at LaGuardia is causing cascading delays across other major airports, mostly in the Northeast corridor (Boston, Washington, D.C.) and major airline hubs like Chicago O’Hare and Atlanta, where inbound planes from LaGuardia are falling significantly behind schedule.

Airline Waivers

Most major airlines have issued flight waivers due to what’s happening at LaGuardia.

Delta has a flexible rebooking waiver for all flights in and out of the New York metro area, including LaGuardia (LGA), John F. Kennedy (JFK), Newark (EWR), and White Plains (HPN). Passengers scheduled to fly through Sunday can rebook their trips without change fees or fare differences.

United has a sweeping East Coast travel alert covering six major hubs, including all airport in the New York region. For any tickets purchased before the disruptions began, United is completely waiving change fees and fare differences and is allowing impacted flyers to reschedule their travel to any date through May 26.