Study recommends airport upgrades

The New York metro area's major airports must add runways and grow or flight gridlock will worsen over the next two decades, a new study says.

With that in mind, an estimated $15 billion should be spent at Kennedy and Newark Liberty airports to handle a projected increase of 50 million air passengers in the next 20 to 30 years, researchers found.

The two-year study, done by the Regional Plan Association, considers several options for increasing capacity at the region's airports, from adding runways to building new rail lines to get people from New York City to suburban airports such as Long Island MacArthur in Ronkonkoma.

Options in the study include:

Adding runways at Kennedy, which may require filling in parts of Jamaica Bay in Queens. "We need to build a city within an existing city," said Chris Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Kennedy, Newark Liberty and LaGuardia airports. "That raises questions of community and environment."

Adding runways at Newark by partially tearing down terminals and rebuilding them.

Reconfiguring airspace and modernizing air traffic control systems.

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The report found that options for expanding LaGuardia Airport are "neither necessary nor feasible."

Researchers concluded that, without a more direct Long Island Rail Road link from Manhattan or Queens to MacArthur, greater use of the Ronkonkoma airport would not help meet the forecasted huge demand.

One thing is certain, the planners said: The clock is running on an increase in demand for airline passenger service to New York City, and without growth of the region's airports, worse runway gridlock will result.

"It takes 10 years to get anything done in the region. Therefore, it needs to be considered now," said Jeffrey Zupan, senior fellow with the association and coauthor of "Upgrading to World Class: The future of the New York Region's Airports."

The study, funded by the Port Authority and the Regional Plan Association, frames the airports' expansion as an economic opportunity. Without increased capacity, the region would lose $2.6 billion in sales and $1 billion in wages by 2030, Zupan said.

Adding and reconfiguring runways at Kennedy and Newark would cost $10 billion, and rebuilding terminals at Newark would cost $5 billion, according to the report.

The money for expansion could come from airport user fees.

The Passenger Facility Charge is a fee passengers pay when buying an airline ticket. Increasing the fee - now $4.50 - to $7 could raise $3.5 billion for the project, Ward said.Legislation to raise the fee to $7 is being considered by the U.S. Senate, he said.

"We need to start talking now and have a Kennedy expansion in place by the 2020s," Zupan said.