By:Andrew Coen
During a meeting of the Town-Village Aircraft Safety and Noise Abatement Committee (TVASNAC), at Lawrence Village Hall on Monday night, aviation officials announced that some John F. Kennedy International Airport runways, that direct planes to descend over the Five Towns, will be rehabbed over the next year. This means that some of the many arriving planes will be re-routed through other areas.
According to Tom Bock, system management specialist with the Port Authority, the runways slated for rehab work starting in September include 13 left and 31 right. These runways direct planes to fly over large parts of Woodmere and Cedarhurst. While work is done on 13 left and 31 right, including paving and replacing the pathway's lights, runway 22 right, which has planes take off over Lawrence and Cedarhurst, will also be revamped, according to Bock.
Bock, who spoke at the meeting along with David Siewert, an air traffic manager at Kennedy, and William Heisman, director of aviation development, said that the project is expected to start in mid-September and take about year to complete with most work done between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. After work is completed on runways 13 left and 31 right, the runway path that causes many planes to take off over Inwood, 13 right, will have rehab work done in 2006, according to Bock. The 13-right runway is the longest in the northeast, according to Bock, at almost three miles and is double the size of the 13 left and 31 right runways.
Bock and Siewert explained that while the Five Towns will receive some relief while construction work is done on the runways, the areas of Floral Park and Valley Stream might get more hard hit .Depending on the wind conditions, planes will be forced to land in other runways and their paths will take the jets through those areas.
"On the overnight hours we always try to keep the traffic over water," said Siewert.
Bock also said at the meeting that he does not anticipate that air traffic will be heavily increased in the Five Towns area during the week of the Republican National Convention in early September.
"There will be a lot of military activity but most of it will be in the higher altitudes so there will not be any general traffic change in the general vicinity airports," said Bock.
According to Siewert, who is an Atlantic Beach resident, flights out of Kennedy, which dropped after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, are back at around the pre-9/11 level with about 1,000 flights a day. Siewert said during the meeting that Kennedy has the ability to accommodate about 1,500 to 1,700 flights per day. Each year, there are more than 300,000 flights and about 34 million passengers who fly on planes to and from Kennedy Airport, according to Siewert.
The next TVASNAC meeting is tentatively scheduled for Monday, Aug. 30 at 7:30 p.m. at Lawrence Village Hall.
The TVASNAC Committee of the Town of Hempstead consists of the villages of Atlantic Beach, Cedarhurst, Lawrence, Hewlett Harbor, Woodsburgh, Island Park, Valley Stream, Floral Park and New Hyde Park.
