Busiest Kennedy airport runway reopening after fixup

Kennedy Airport's busiest runway, closed since March for a massive repaving project, is about to be cleared for takeoff.

Announcement of the runway's completed reconstruction is slated for next week, but Mary-Grace Tomecki, a Floral Park village trustee and a member of a community noise-abatement committee, is among the officials who have personally inspected the resurfaced and expanded Runway 13R31L.

"I got a preview tour," said Tomecki, a member of the Town-Village Aircraft Safety & Noise Abatement Committee, which monitors aircraft noise over Nassau County municipalities near Kennedy Airport. "It's done. They were basically cleaning up the construction site."

Jennifer Friedberg, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority, which operates the airport, said Runway 13R-31L will officially reopen with a ceremony scheduled for Tuesday at 11 a.m.

Friedberg said the construction work was "on time and on budget" but declined to give further details.

The $376.3-million four-month project forced the closure of the airport's main departure runway on March 1. The Port Authority provided $292.4 million, and the Federal Aviation Administration kicked in $83.9 million. Of the FAA contribution, $15 million was stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Work included replacing the runway's blacktop with concrete and widening it from 150 feet to 200 feet. Last year, the runway handled 143,000 of 414,920 total takeoffs and landings at Kennedy, according to Port Authority statistics.

Because of the runway's closure, airlines such as JetBlue, the busiest domestic carrier using Kennedy, delayed increasing flights for the summer travel season.

Tomecki said she toured the new runway on Tuesday with a Port Authority executive. The runway rehabilitation had sparked concern among residents of communities including Floral Park, Elmont, Mineola and Garden City because the closure forced the FAA to route more planes on approach to the airport over their towns. More flights meant more airplane noise.

Though Tomecki said she noticed an increase in airplane noise, she said the FAA did a good job of rotating runway configuration so that the noise was spread more equitably during the four-month closure.

"They did mitigate the noise," Tomecki said. "You saw a lot of effort to rotate runways."

The runway's closure sparked some flight delays. According to FAA statistics, there was a 6.3 percent increase in delays in takeoffs and landings during the first week in March when compared with the same period in 2009.