Delta may finish $3.5bn La Guardia rebuild “much sooner”

Delta Air Lines (DL, Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson) plans to finish a USD3.5 billion redevelopment at New York La Guardia Airport earlier than the original completion date of 2026, Forbes, has reported. As the coronavirus crisis keeps flights and airport passenger numbers low, estimated project costs for 2020 are down and the work is proceeding much faster. “With the drop in demand, we actually see an opportunity to accelerate some of the construction,” Delta’s chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, said during the virtual Wolfe Global Transportation Conference last week, something that will “lower the overall project cost but also deliver it much, much sooner.” The redevelopment is a “massive project on a postage stamp size of land,” Jacobson said, covering 37 gates across four concourses. The first new concourse at La Guardia opened last November on land that was previously empty. “If we have an opportunity to bring down multiple concourses at the same time, we can actually save on that iterative construction process.” The original plan foresaw one concourse being developed at a time, with the next one to open in 2022, but the newly accelerated plan could redevelop multiple concourses simultaneously because of the reduced activity at the gates.