LA GUARDIA AIRPORT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 October 1940, Page 6

LA GUARDIA AIRPORT

COMPLETION AT COST OF £8.000,000. TERMINAL AT NEW YORK. The British flying-boat Clare, which recently completed a successful run to America to mark the resumption of the British transatlantic air service, has as its New York arrival point the new La Guardia Airport. Completed only last winter at a cost of some £8,000,000, to cope with the ever increasing aviation traffic, both for passengers and commerce, the new La Guardia Airport replaced Newark Terminal, for so long New York’s air base, though 15 miles distance from the centre of Manhattan. For years the Mayor of New York. Mr La Guardia, maintained that the city should build its own airport, and thanks to the New Deal’s prolific spending on public works, he was able at the end to secure from the Government a sufficiently large appropriation to build at North Beach, a site near the World’s Fair and less than ten miles from the city. The existence, of North Beach itself is a tribute to modern engineering, for its present space of 550 acres of carefully planned and “landscaped” landing fields and runways has been constructed out of “made” ground states a report in the London “Daily Telegraph.” Three years ago, when the project was started, the site consisted of about 100 acres of swampy land surrounded by marshes unfit for anything but rubbish dumps. Today the area has been increased fourfold or fivefold, and massive hangars dominate the new airfield. There are four runways for land ’planes. The longest, 6,000 feet bf macadamised asphalt, 200 feet wide, runs, north-west and south-east to take advantage of the most frequent favourable winds. The other three, intended for. use by seaplanes, are respectively 5,000 feet, 4,500 feet, and 3,532 feet long and run from north-east to southwest, from east to west, and from north to south. required to work this marvellous transformation had to be transported, truckload by truckload, with 485 lorries working 24 hours a day for 18 months, from Rikers Island, the site of one of the city’s prislons. There a 50-years’ accumulation of ashes and cinders had piled into mounds hundreds of feet high, smoking malodorous hills that ruined the view and often brought wafts of foul air to contaminate many of New York’s best residential districts. Nearly 17.000.000 cubic yards of “fill” had to be brought from Rikers Island, Here at one port are facilities both for land and sea machines. Pan-Ame-rican, which flies the transatlantic Clipper service as well as many services running to southern U.S.A.. South America, West Indies, and the Pacific, have a five-sided hangar fully equipped both for servicing and storage. Their sea service is aided by the fact that there are available immediately next to the airport three bodies of water fjo give ’planes the opportunity to take off or alight in any direction most favourable at any particular time. Seven hundred and twenty ’planes can be received and dispatched in 24 hours, the arrivals and departures being handled by a covered loading platform 1,500 feet long and 20 feet wide that runs along the edge of a milelong concrete and macadam “apron.” . Twenty acres of parking space are available fcr motor-cars, while the enormous quantity of petrol that is needed is brought to the airport directly by water and discharged into storage tanks through specially built pipelines.