The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey hasn’t always been up to the task in its management of LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark airports, said Huntley Lawrence, the agency’s aviation director.
But that will change, starting now, he promised.
«Every day more and more customers arrive and every day those same customers tell us they are not happy about something or a lot of things, and guess what, I am not happy either,» Lawrence said Thursday during a speech at IATA’s Aviation Day USA conference.
Lawrence, who took his current post at the port authority in January 2017, cited as an example the problem of passengers suffering delays at LaGuardia without seats to wait in.
«Let me assure you this will no longer fly with the terminals we are building today,» he said.
His remarks came as LaGuardia remains in the relatively early stages of an $8 billion redevelopment and as the port authority prepares to begin the construction phase of its $2.4 billion redevelopment of Newark’s Terminal A.
They also came immediately after IATA secretary general Alexandre de Juniac announced that IATA has begun its own review of what led to the meltdown at Kennedy Airport on the weekend of Jan. 4, when a major snowstorm set off a chain of miscommunication involving the port authority, Kennedy’s contracted terminal managers and foreign airlines that resulted in more than 140 diversions, more than 1,000 cancellations and operational chaos, which included waits on the tarmac of several hours.
The IATA probe will join investigations that are already underway on the matter by the FAA, the Department of Transportation and by former secretary of transportation Ray LaHood at the behest of the port authority.
«I won’t pre-judge the results of these efforts,» de Juniac said of the IATA review. «But one thing is already clear. We did not have enough processes in place to ensure that all parties had timely access to the same information on which effective and coordinated decisions could have been made»…
