Due to the growth in air travel delays in the New York region's
airports, the federal government has instituted caps on the number of scheduled
flights per hour allowed into and out of the airports.
JFK and Newark are both capped at 80-81 scheduled operations per hour and LaGuardia is currently limited to 78. This action is considered a temporary solution to help provide some immediate congestion relief and reduction in delays. In the long-term these caps are not tenable as they would limit the ability of airports to serve future demand, which could potentially lead to the stagnation of regional economy.
Another result of the caps is the shift of demand to other periods of the day outside of the traditional peaks. This has lead to almost constant number of operations throughout most of the day, completely eliminating or reducing the duration of off-peak periods. This development has impacted the ability of the airports to recover from incidents or delays, resulting in cumulative delays that tend run the remainder of the day.
The most pronounced of these cases is at LaGuardia Airport, where the scheduled airline flights by hour maintain a high peak of flights per hour in the mid-seventies from seven in the morning until nine at night.
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