Friday, April 24, 2009

LaGuardia just plain sucks

From GQ:

To get to the air-traffic-control tower at New York's LaGuardia Airport, you have to walk through Concourse D in the Central Terminal, past the shiny shops and fat pretzels and premium brews, into and back out of streams of travelers yammering wirelessly at wives, lovers, brokers. You come to a thick steel battleship-gray door, shove it open with your hip. Step inside. You are now in…Leningrad? Bucharest?

Cinder-block walls washed in dingy fluorescent light, a cramped elevator, slow and rickety, up to the tenth floor. This is the center of the universe, a tower serving 23 million passengers a year as they fly in and out of the most congested airspace in the world, and yeah, this tower, built in 1962, one of the oldest in America, is a dump.

The FAA promises a new tower next year. You can see it emerging next to the parking garage. It's right there. Some LaGuardia controllers remember hearing about a-new-tower-next-year as far back as 1984. "Next year." "Next year." "Why fix up the old tower when a new tower is coming next year?" A quarter of a century of no next-years is enough to make any worker with a spare shirt in his locker in case of a toilet explosion feel…skeptical.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

New tower?
Built like Junkyard Stadium ?
Electronics by Airbus or LG ??
All the brains are in the cemetery with most the Apollo engineers.

I hope nobody lives in Whitestone!!!

ew-3 said...

The same government that runs the FAA now wants to take over your health care.

Anonymous said...

Why fix up this airport at all?

It was beyond its capacity to safely handle the volume of air traffic decades ago.

Retire La Guardia into an air field for smaller domestc planes and air freight.

Who the hell is running that place anyway?

Anonymous said...

Isn't it somebody who's on the board of the Queens Botanical Gardens?

Well...Plant some new runways!

Anonymous said...

Yes, the FAA will be in charge of health care. Just as the Department of Agriculture is in charge of the Navy.

ew-3 said...

'Yes, the FAA will be in charge of health care. Just as the Department of Agriculture is in charge of the Navy"

try reading for comprehension...

suspect you went to a government school.

Anonymous said...

ew-3 said...
The same government that runs the FAA now wants to take over your health care.

Friday, April 24, 2009
_________________________________

And a lot of the people that run the FAA were there in the previous Government, appointed by Mr. Bush.

Anonymous said...

Why this article now? The new tower has topped off. Why make complaints about the old one at this point.

Bsides, they are looking at studies to replace the entire terminal B

ew-3 said...

"And a lot of the people that run the FAA were there in the previous Government, appointed by Mr. Bush."

and in the end it was the FAA folks during the Bush administration got the job done after 8 years of non-action by the clinton administration.

Anonymous said...

I actually went to Catholic school.

Anonymous said...

ew-3 said...
"And a lot of the people that run the FAA were there in the previous Government, appointed by Mr. Bush."

and in the end it was the FAA folks during the Bush administration got the job done after 8 years of non-action by the clinton administration.

Friday, April 24, 2009

-----------------------------------------

Gee, that's really telling me...as well as the other 75% of the nation who thought that Chene...er...I mean, Bush did a rotten job.

What do you define as getting the job done, anyway?

Destroying the American economy?
Destroying the standing of this nation in the world?
Trampling on the Constitution (actually, they were pretty good at that)?

Anonymous said...

Wow, this comment thread is mad noise, as always. Thank you, Krappie Krew!