NEW YORK-
Air travel is poised to jet past another milestone in the New York metropolitan area today, with the full force of the Christmas crush still to come.
Someone arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport this afternoon will have the dizzying distinction of being the 100-millionth passenger of the year at the region’s three major airports, according to the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.
He or she will set a record for Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty International airports. Together, they logged just under 100 million travelers last year. They’re on track to handle 104 million by the end of 2006, an increase of more than 28 percent in just four years.
The new statistic caps a series of recent records for the three airports. Last year’s traffic set one, as did the more than 50.6 million passengers who trooped through in the first half of this year. Newark’s passenger count hit a new high of 34.2 million just this weekend, surpassing a record set in 2000.
“Increased air passenger traffic is a strong economic stimulus, so it’s more important than ever for us to continue focusing resources on our airports,” Port Authority Chairman Anthony Coscia said in a statement earlier this year.
At Newark and the other airports, the passenger records are a measure of a rebound in air traffic since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The airborne attacks spurred a sharp downturn in air travel, leading to several airline bankruptcies.
Five years later, about 42 million people around the world are expected to fly on U.S. airlines between Dec. 14 and Jan. 3, according to the Air Transport Association, a major airline industry group. The estimate represents a 2.4-percent increase over last year’s holiday season.
While a boon to airlines, the growth in air traffic can be a bane for travelers. One New York flight–Comair Flight 5283 from Washington Reagan National Airport–landed late 100 percent of the time in September, in part because of chronic congestion at New York’s airports. JFK, Newark and LaGuardia have among the nation’s worst on-time records, although their delays aren’t quite as bad as those at hubs in Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia.
Coscia has warned that things may only get worse if the region doesn’t find a way to develop other regional airports to handle the overload.
“Understand that this is the most congested airspace in the world,” Port Authority spokesman Pasquale DiFulco said last month. “We know growth is coming, and we only have so much airspace, and you can only fit so many planes in the sky.”
The New York metropolitan area’s airports already offer more flights to more nonstop destinations than any other airport system in the world, according to the Port Authority. The airports employ almost 500,000 people.
