Business jets were arrayed on the ramp at HPN during the NBAA White Plains Regional Forum.
WEST HARRISON, New York—Air traffic management disruptions in the U.S. Northeast this spring at least temporarily reordered operations at business aviation hub airports in the region.
Though not a part of the Newark, New Jersey, airspace managed by FAA approach control at Philadelphia International Airport, Westchester County Airport (HPN) near White Plains, New York, experienced spillover operations due to air traffic control constraints and runway construction at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) in April and May that caused a ripple effect across the region.
Million Air, one of three major fixed-based operators (FBO) at HPN, saw opportunity in the frustration operators were feeling in the heavily trafficked New York metropolitan area.
“Skip the delays—we’re ready on the ramp at Million Air White Plains,” the FBO said in an email promotion. “We’ve got ample ramp space, zero departure delays and a team standing by to deliver the five-star service you expect. Plus, with our quick and easy drive into Manhattan, you’ll save hours compared to the gridlock of other airports.”
Located 30 mi. by car north of midtown Manhattan, HPN logged 162,098 aircraft movements (takeoffs and landings) in 2024, of which 83% were corporate and general aviation flights. While it is also served by five scheduled passenger airlines, the county-owned airfield lays claim to being one of the top-five busiest general aviation airports in the country.
Million Air, Atlantic Aviation and Signature Aviation have FBO facilities at HPN. Fractional fleet operators Flexjet and NetJets have private terminals there, and IBM, JP Morgan Chase and PepsiCo maintain corporate hangars.
Gulfstream in late April announced the opening of a new Field & Airborne Support Team base at HPN to expeditiously respond to aircraft-on-ground situations. “We continually assess our service offerings based on fleet growth, aircraft movements and customer demand as we identify areas for expansion,” explained Gulfstream Senior Vice President for Customer Support Lor Izzard.
Coincident to the flight delays at EWR that made national news—and, less publicly, disrupted business aviation in the region—HPN hosted the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) White Plains Regional Forum in early June. The timing of the regional conference during a spate of extraordinary air traffic congestion helped organizers emphasize the advantages of operating to HPN, which reportedly saw more than 100 additional flights some days and ramp congestion of its own.
“Very recently, operators chose HPN to alleviate air traffic challenges faced by our region, minimizing disruptions in business and further cementing our role as an asset to the economy,” declared Airport Manager April Gasparri at the start of the conference, held in a vast Million Air hangar.
NBAA Board Chairman J.D. Witzig, vice president of corporate aviation with Pfizer Inc., alluded to HPN’s rivalry with Teterboro Airport (TEB) in New Jersey as a favored destination for business aviation. “For those of us in the business, we always say the only redeeming quality of Teterboro is it keeps more people out of White Plains,” quipped Witzig, drawing laughs from the audience.
At the time, air traffic control dysfunction and the closure of EWR parallel Runway 4L/22R for a planned rehabilitation project were having the opposite effect of driving TEB traffic to HPN. Last year, Teterboro logged 172,499 aircraft movements, according to its owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ). TEB does not permit scheduled airline operations, and most of its operations involve jets, making it the busiest U.S. airport for private jets.
During an NBAA-hosted webcast on air traffic control problems in May, Teterboro Users Group President Dave Belastock remarked that some operators had “self-selected to go to White Plains” to avoid dealing with Newark airspace altogether. “White Plains has taken some substantial additional volume, [leading to] gridlock on the field and significant delays,” he added.
Million Air Regional Sales Director Brandon Weaver attested to the surge in flight activity at HPN. “We’ve been experiencing almost double traffic, starting about a month ago,” he said during a walk-around of the FBO’s modern-rustic, wood-and-stone-accented terminal building.
“HPN has always sort of been the fail-safe from traffic at Teterboro,” Weaver elaborated. “When people can’t get into Teterboro, they come here. People were telling me at Teterboro there were 9-hr. tower delays.”
He acknowledged the surge was challenging operationally—at its busiest points, Million Air was servicing 90 daily arrivals and 90 departures. But with seven 5,000-gal. Jet A refuelers and a 1,000-gal. avgas truck, the FBO managed to accommodate the increased traffic. It also was in the process of nearly doubling its staff from 40 to 70 employees, adding customer service professionals and a dispatcher to communicate with pilots on the ground.
Though the surge in activity was slowing by the time of the NBAA forum, Weaver believes it left a favorable impression of the airport with potential new customers.
“Once you come to HPN and you experience HPN, you see that it’s not much further to drive to the city,” Weaver said. “You can have cars out on the ramp—you can’t have that at Teterboro. There is less congestion. I think a lot of those customers are going to stay.”
Interdependent Airspace
Though it lies closer to Manhattan than HPN, Teterboro is bedeviled by its proximity to Newark Liberty, one of the nation’s busiest commercial airports in its most congested air traffic region. Among other nearby airfields serving New York City are John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports. Operations at TEB and EWR are interrelated and interdependent. For example, airliners arriving at Newark Liberty from the north use a VOR transmitter at Teterboro as the initial fix for the instrument landing system (ILS) approach to Runway 22 at EWR. The airports share departure fixes, requiring controllers to approve Teterboro departures on a single-release basis when there is a high volume of departures from Newark.
“Something particular about New York is the amount of airports that we have in a very tight airspace,” Andrew Aponte, FAA district general manager for New York, explained to the NBAA forum. “Other airports like Atlanta, like Denver, like [Dallas Fort-Worth] have wide, open spaces; in New York you just don’t have that ability [to route flights]. In each runway configuration at our different airports, other airspace is affected.”
When metropolitan New York airports change their runway configurations or operational orientations due to wind direction, weather conditions or runway maintenance, other airports are affected.
“If Kennedy is switching from southeast flow to northeast flow and the different configurations for overflow that they have, that’s going to affect LaGuardia directly,” Aponte said. “LaGuardia’s flows are going to have a direct effect on what Newark does, [and] once Newark flips, Teterboro has to flip,” he added. “Once LaGuardia flips, then White Plains has to flip. There is a great deal of communications and coordination behind the scenes.”
In a now oft-reported development, the FAA in July 2024 transferred management of the Newark airspace sector from its beleaguered New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (Tracon) facility on Long Island, known as N90, to the Philadelphia Tower Tracon at Philadelphia International Airport. In addition to Newark Liberty, controllers assigned to the reconstituted Philadelphia Tracon Area C also manage inbound or outbound flights for TEB, Linden, Morristown and Essex County airports in New Jersey.
The FAA hardwired connections for communications and surveillance and weather data between N90 and Philadelphia Tracon Area C. Radar and communications outages attributed to that pipeline between April 28 and May 11 prompted the agency to implement a series of ground delays and other traffic management initiatives, causing thousands of flight delays and cancellations at Newark Liberty and disrupting operations at nearby airports.
Contributing to the trouble was the rehabilitation of Runway 4L/22R at EWR, a $121 million project that involved repaving the 11,000-ft.-long runway surface, changing from incandescent to LED lighting, installing new underground electrical infrastructure and improving the drainage. Starting in early March, the runway was closed on weeknights and weekends. On April 15, it was fully closed, reducing capacity at the airport to two operational runways.
In the glare of the national spotlight following the FAA’s air traffic control outages, the PANYNJ, which manages city-owned EWR, mobilized additional work crews from offsite projects, conducted round-the-clock milling and paving, brought a second asphalt plant online and completed the runway rehabilitation two weeks ahead of schedule on June 2.
“Newark presently has the ability to use the inboard Runway 4L/22R as a departure-only runway,” Aponte said. “The ILS has not yet been flight-checked, but it is scheduled to be done shortly. Long story short, they have the ability to run more aircraft in and out of Newark Airport now, which they did not have previously.”
The FAA for now has capped aircraft movements at EWR while it installs new, high-bandwidth telecommunications lines between facilities and increases controller staffing at the Philadelphia Tracon. The agency announced on June 6 that arrivals and departures at EWR will be limited to 34 each per hour through Oct. 25. They will be further limited to 28 each per hour on weekends from September through December to accommodate airport construction.
Dean Snell, NBAA manager of air traffic services at the FAA’s Air Traffic Control Command Center in Warrenton, Virginia, explained that movements at TEB and other satellite airports are governed by an airspace flow program that meters the movement of aircraft through the airspace.
“Teterboro will not pay the price for the increase in rates at Newark,” Snell pledged. “Our position at the Command Center is that we are certainly advocating for business aviation at all airports in New York, but obviously Teterboro is a very important one for us.”
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