While looking around New York city on Google Earth I found what appears to be an extremely busy day at La Guardia.What have you found?Joe

While looking around New York city on Google Earth I found what appears to be an extremely busy day at La Guardia What have you found?Joe

I don't have any photo, or any hard statistics, but at LGA it's not all that unusual for the 5pm rush hour departure line to be as much as twenty aircraft long -- not if weather suddenly deteriorated elsewhere in the national airspace system.EDIT: My post didn't come out right. What I should have said is that at rush hour every day at LGA is a busy day. What you've shown us is actually typical, and that it can get a lot worse if the network managers are cancelling landing reservation slots or if they have to route a lot of traffic through what are rapidly becoming enroute choke points elsewhere.Did you look for landing traffic? That might add even more spice to what you've shown us.

Yikes! Looks like LGA needs AI Smooth...And I do hope the AC on what appears to be an approach heading (though slightly left of course) is going around or doing anything but landing!

Yikes! Looks like LGA needs AI Smooth...And I do hope the AC on what appears to be an approach heading (though slightly left of course) is going around or doing anything but landing!

If you run a straightedge through the centerline of the landing aircraft you'll see that it's lined up with the runway centerline, or so it seemed to me. What you're seeing is normal procedure for a busy NYC airport. The departing aircraft will have been told to taxi into position and hold, this so the Tower controller can launch him at any time with no delay whatsoever. (Seconds count.) The departing aircraft will have begun its takeoff roll before the landing aircraft has cleared the runway. Both aircraft will have been told to expedite. If anything had disrupted the flow, the landing aircraft would have been instructed to do a go-around, which would have put him into a holding stack nearby, burning fuel while waiting to be squeezed into the flow again.Very likely there is a line of inbound aircraft spaced anywhere from five to three miles apart depending on traffic density. The name of the game is to safely manage the flow of landing aircraft, squeezing departures in as the opportunities arise. The whole scene is as tightly choreographed as an old fashioned Hollywood musical dance number. This is why the line of aircraft waiting to taxi into position and hold is known as the "conga line".

Hi, Mike,Are you meaning to tell me the aircraft on the numbers for departure was cleared to take the active with another aircraft on a 1/4 mile final? The assumption is that the departing aircraft in going to out-accelerate the landing aircraft, not to mention wake turbulence issues for both the landing and departing aircraft? I believe you were a RL pilot (at one time) as am I. I have to say, if what you're saying is true, this seems like an LAX-type disaster waiting to happen. Do you recall many years ago when a heavy commercial airliner landed on top of a Metroliner (I think)? I have to believe that landing aircraft is going to have to go around.Tawni

Hi, Mike,Are you meaning to tell me the aircraft on the numbers for departure was cleared to take the active with another aircraft on a 1/4 mile final? The assumption is that the departing aircraft in going to out-accelerate the landing aircraft, not to mention wake turbulence issues for both the landing and departing aircraft? I believe you were a RL pilot (at one time) as am I. I have to say, if what you're saying is true, this seems like an LAX-type disaster waiting to happen. Do you recall many years ago when a heavy commercial airliner landed on top of a Metroliner (I think)? I have to believe that landing aircraft is going to have to go around.Tawni

GOOGLE Earth produces some very weird pix of planes at airports and in the air around them. I've seen some weird images that are simply impossible in real life. Recently I saw two 747s in the air a few hundreds yards apart after take off from supposedly the same runway at an airport with their shadows in very strange places as well. I think this pic of KLGA is one of them very weird GOOGLE Earth images.JS

Hi, Mike,Are you meaning to tell me the aircraft on the numbers for departure was cleared to take the active with another aircraft on a 1/4 mile final? The assumption is that the departing aircraft in going to out-accelerate the landing aircraft, not to mention wake turbulence issues for both the landing and departing aircraft? I believe you were a RL pilot (at one time) as am I. I have to say, if what you're saying is true, this seems like an LAX-type disaster waiting to happen. Do you recall many years ago when a heavy commercial airliner landed on top of a Metroliner (I think)? I have to believe that landing aircraft is going to have to go around.Tawni

Hi Tawni,Not 1/4 mile final but three miles for sure. (I have no explanation for the details of the photo.) Obviously only the creme de la controller creme dare operate this way, but equally obviously it's the only way to keep the system flowing as the civil fleet expands but the number of runways does not. (In what I wrote I was mainly referring to La Guardia and secondarily to Newark. Kennedy doesn't have this kind of congestion because they have plenty of runways, including several parallel runways. )But you're right on -- LAX is also very constrained, with only two runways. Yes, I do remember that accident. Could it happen again? Absolutely. When traffic is heavy there you'll hear the tower controller telling departing aircraft to taxi across the active runway expeditiously, for example, sandwiching the ground traffic in between arrivals and departures.This kind of stuff doesn't bother me as a passenger but I think that if the general public understood what ATC professionals have to do to keep the traffic moving, they might get more interested in high speed rail service. (Which of course would have safety problems of its own.)

Great find there. I do know google tends to, at times, show some strange image combinations but i believe this one is real as the shawdows all seem to match and there is no dividing line obvious that would indicate two different pictures being put together.

Not 1/4 mile final but three miles for sure. (I have no explanation for the details of the photo.)

Good morning, Jim!Three miles? Are we looking at the same aircraft? I see, in the op's goggle earth image, three aircraft circled in red. One departing aircraft, one on the numbers and the other on final. Now, the runways at LGA are about 7000 feet, less than 1.5 miles in length. Three miles would be more than twice the length of the runway. Somehow that math doesn't quite add up. I'm sticking with a 1/4 mile. At three miles, I could see the aircraft in position for takeoff being there with sufficient (though still not very much) time to depart with adequate safety margins, but--to me, anyway--that does not appear to be the case in this image. If this is, in fact, how tightly aircraft are spaced at LGA, let me just say, 'What time does that train leave?' :( Check six!Tawni

Good morning, Jim!Three miles? Are we looking at the same aircraft? I see, in the op's goggle earth image, three aircraft circled in red. One departing aircraft, one on the numbers and the other on final. Now, the runways at LGA are about 7000 feet, less than 1.5 miles in length. Three miles would be more than twice the length of the runway. Somehow that math doesn't quite add up. I'm sticking with a 1/4 mile. At three miles, I could see the aircraft in position for takeoff being there with sufficient (though still not very much) time to depart with adequate safety margins, but--to me, anyway--that does not appear to be the case in this image. If this is, in fact, how tightly aircraft are spaced at LGA, let me just say, 'What time does that train leave?' :( Check six!Tawni

I meant three mile separation for arrivals. It hadn't occurred to me that the aircraft on the left might be a departure (don't get old if you can reasonably avoid it) so in fact there is no mystery in the photo. However, I'm amazed that the aircraft in position had enough time to cross the hold line, turn and line up before the departing aircraft reached the position on the runway that it has. A separation of 1/4 mile would be insanity because that's a distance of only about 1300 feet. Turbine aircraft on short final are probably doing close to 200 feet per second so this would give a time separation between arrivals of about seven seconds. It can't be done safely.In contrast, three mile separation in distance is about 80 seconds separation in time, enough to interleave arrivals and departures assuming everybody does what they're supposed to do, when they're supposed to do it.My name is Mike, not Jim. Since this is your first violation I'm not going to write you a ticket.

My apologies, Mike. Don't know where that came from!You wrote:It hadn't occurred to me that the aircraft on the left might be a departure (don't get old if you can reasonably avoid it)...I guess I haven't been able to avoid it myself! :( And, it didn't occur to me that the aircraft on the left might have just landed. Regardless, it's the proximity of the approaching aircraft with the aircraft positioned for take off that I find alarming.Tawni

[it's] the proximity of the approaching aircraft with the aircraft positioned for take off that I find alarming.

The traveling public wants convenience. La Guardia, Midway, Washington National, Lambert, Orange County -- all are close-in airports. They are accidents waiting to happen because all are airports that by any definition are inadequate in the jet age.Yet in a way this is reasonable. Transportation has always been about convenience -- ten days in a sooty, dangerous train instead of three months in a sailing ship around Cape Horn -- and it has always had risks regardless of the transportation mode.