NY celebrated on Wednesday the inauguration of a new four-story terminal at the airport of LaGuardia, a new stage in its total reconstruction for 8,000 million dollars, in the middle of the enormous crisis of air transport due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Will we need airports? Yes, we will need airports,” said the governor. Andrew Cuomo during the opening of Terminal B at the Queens Airport, which opens to the public on Saturday.
“Planes will fly, cars will circulate, trains will too, life goes on after Covid-19“added Cuomo, who advocates carrying out major infrastructure works in the face of the worst recession in U.S from the Great Depression of 1929.
“There is no doubt that air travel will return, the question is not ‘if’ but ‘when'”, declared Rick Cotton, executive director of the Port Authority, which manages the airports in the New York region.
The new terminal will have updated cleaning protocols due to the virus, disinfectant dispensers and digital access, he detailed. The use of a chinstrap will be mandatory.
The modernization of the aging airport, a flagship Cuomo project, began in 2015, and should be completed in a year and a half.
“We needed to see the light at the end of the tunnel … we needed to see New York standing up, shining, we needed to remember that this is a formidable place,” Cuomo said.
New York City, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, has had more than 21,000 deaths from the disease since March.
LaGuardia airport receives mostly domestic flights. In 2018 it had a traffic of 30 million passengers, with about 372,000 flights.
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