Originally Posted by
misd-agin
It's also the proximity of the three airports in NY. To put the airport alignments in perspective image LHR being EWR, LGA being in Regents Park with 3/4 of the traffic that LHR has, and JFK being at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
LGW is 25 nm from LHR. In 20 nm NYC has EWR, JFK, LGA and TEB. So in the space that LHR has 475,000 movements NYC has 1, 485,000.
That puts it into even greater perspective. LHR - LGW is 25 nm, LHR - STN is 36 nm, and GTW - LTN is 44 nm.
The closest proximity between any of the 4 busiest London airports is between the 2 least busy, STN - LTN, at 22 nm, which are farther away from each other than the greatest distance between any pair of NY's 4. LGA alone handles significantly more traffic (372,000) than STN and LTN do put together (324,000)
To compare, NY's 2 least busy airports of the 4 are LGA and TEB, sited 11 nm apart, and together have 547,000 movements, 72,000 more than LHR itself.
LGA's most distant neighbor is EWR, still just 14 nm away, and together those 2 handle 825,000 movements. LGA's closest neighbor is JFK, only 9 nm away, and together they are moving 828,000.
JFK - LGA is 9 nm, JFK - EWR is 18 nm, JFK - TEB is 20 nm (the greatest distance between any 2). If one sat at a central point amongst them on the East River between Midtown Manhattan and Queens, JFK, EWR, LGA, and TEB are all happening within a distance of 5 LHR runway lengths.
Yet somehow and despite the close proximity (9 - 20 nm) to one another as compared to say, London, the "horribly inept" NY TRACON controllers manage to use the airspace around them to move almost 1.456 million flights a year in and out of these 4 airports (to say nothing of handling the additional 500,000 IFR and VFR flights taking-off/landing/going elsewhere). Perhaps if they re-built the 4 main NY airports spread out to double the distances between them while at the same time knocking-back the traffic to less than 1.085 million a year everyone could lollygag a bit, feelings would never be hurt, and simple questions answered when asked.