LaGuardia Airport reopened at 2 p.m. Monday, roughly 14 hours after the fatal collision between an Air Canada Express jet and a Port Authority fire truck on Runway 4. The reopening was not a return to normal. The airport was operating on a single runway — a constraint that will remain in place until at least Friday morning at 7 a.m. — and was immediately absorbing a backlog of diverted and delayed flights from the overnight closure. For the millions of travelers trying to get somewhere for spring break this week, the math is not encouraging.
LaGuardia's design makes single-runway operations uniquely painful. Unlike John F. Kennedy Airport or Newark, which have multiple parallel runways, LaGuardia's two runways intersect in an X configuration. When one is closed, the other serves all arrivals and departures. On a normal Monday, the airport handles roughly 450 aircraft movements. On a single runway under instrument conditions, the practical maximum is around 45 to 55 movements per hour — meaning the airport can theoretically run near normal throughput only if conditions are perfect, spacing is tight, and every turnaround is executed without error. Real operations don't work that way.
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