A sudden subterranean sinkhole discovered alongside Runway 4/22 at New York's LaGuardia Airport on Wednesday triggered one of the worst single-day operational collapses at the busy facility in years, with more than 400 flights cancelled and over 320 delayed by Thursday morning as the Port Authority scrambled to reopen the closed strip ahead of the Memorial Day travel rush.
Port Authority engineers identified the void during a routine 11:00 a.m. EST runway inspection on May 20, immediately closing Runway 4/22 β LaGuardia's busiest departure surface β and forcing the entire airport onto a single operating runway, 13/31. Within twelve hours, controllers had logged 252 cancellations and 321 delays, with knock-on disruption rippling out to Chicago O'Hare, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta, and Dallas/Fort Worth as crews and aircraft fell out of position.
Delta Air Lines and American Airlines absorbed the heaviest impact, both running large LaGuardia operations from Terminals C and B respectively. Southwest Airlines, which only operates a handful of daily flights into LGA, escaped largely unscathed. By Thursday afternoon the Port Authority confirmed the runway would remain closed into the evening as engineering teams stabilized the underlying soil and re-laid surface concrete, with a reopening targeted before Friday morning's departure bank.
A perfect-storm collision with Memorial Day demand
The closure could not have come at a worse moment. LaGuardia handles roughly 1,000 movements per day during peak summer operations, with Runway 4/22 absorbing the bulk of jet departures while the shorter 13/31 typically handles arrivals and turboprops. Cutting the airport's runway capacity in half on the eve of Memorial Day weekend β one of the three busiest travel periods of the U.S. calendar β left thousands of passengers stranded and airlines burning through reserve crews to rebuild schedules.
Compounding the chaos, intense thunderstorms swept across the New York City metropolitan area Wednesday afternoon, briefly grounding even the surviving runway and bottling up air traffic across the entire Northeast corridor.
What happens next
The Port Authority has not yet released a full engineering report on what caused the sinkhole, though officials confirmed the void was directly adjacent to β not on β the active runway surface. A similar collapse forced a temporary closure at LGA in 2019, with that event ultimately traced to aging utility tunnels beneath the airport's reclaimed shoreline footprint.
For travelers, the disruption is likely to linger into the weekend even after Runway 4/22 reopens. Airlines warn that displaced aircraft and crew assignments will take 48 to 72 hours to fully reset, and rebooking inventory across major carriers is already tight ahead of the holiday surge.
Compiled from publicly available aviation news sources. Featured image: AI-generated by AviationShop. This article is original editorial content; facts have been verified across multiple public sources.
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