Analise

I'm watching the news and the lead off story is the unbelievable traffic at LGA that apparently started in the late afternoon with an ambulance fire on the Grand Central and the traffic that followed it. People have been stuck for hours waiting for taxis and the rest started walking off the airport to the other side of the Grand Central. There is a concern now about fuel because fuel trucks cannot get to LGA to fuel up the aircraft. If they can't get in, there will of course be more delays and potential cancellations.

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local...366456631.html

Anyone stuck in this?

o mikros

I never realized that fuel was delivered to airports by truck; I'd always assumed it was via some sort of pipeline and then stored in those big tanks you sometimes see aboveground. I'd even assumed that the delivery to places like LGA (right on the water) could be made from a small tanker ship.

Now you've made me curious: since the capacity of a tanker trunk is roughly that of the fuel burn for a transcon flight, how come we don't see a constant procession of tanker trucks en route to every major hub?

Dianne47

What a mess!

dchristiva

Only in NY! What a place! @:-)

oh_lol

Fuel is available on site at airports. They are PUMPED out of the ground.
The only times when fuel is carried by a truck is for small propeller planes.
It wouldn't be possible for trucks to carry the amount of fuel required for jet planes. Some planes can carry up to 200T of fuel, or about 50,000gallons.

Xnuiem

That is not entirely true. A lot of airports do truck their fuel to the airport from other places. DFW for example has several fuel dumps nearby, a big one is in Grapevine. They use normal trucks on normal roads to get some of the fuel to the airports.

Also, in reality, only very few, and only bigger airports, pump fuel from ground tanks/pipes. Most, the vast majority, do still use trucks to fuel aircraft, including commercial jet liners. Now, you are correct, if you add the caveat of widebodies not being able to economically be fueled by a truck because of the extreme amount of fuel they can carry, but there a lot of airports, BUR for example, parts of LAX, and even parts of the mess that is LHR, that still use trucks for the single aisle crowd. Look up ASIG's website, they provide more of that service worldwide than just about anyone else.

daprophecy

I was stuck there! I was flying out of Term C - that was backed up for about 45 minutes minimum. I asked my driver to go to Term D Arrivals, and walked up to D Departure, went through security, and walked to Term C (like a 8-12 minute walk).

That situation was a real mess. I didn't know there was a fire on the GCP. I thought it had to do with the snow. They really need to fix the entrance and exit to the airport.

nrr

Besides entrances and exits, LGA has LOTS of other "things" which need to be fixed. The PATH will commit billions to an LGA make-over (so they say)--based on the way public works projects progress, we MAY see the "new" LGA by 2050.

o mikros

I'm aware that they use trucks to fuel the aircraft; I was not aware that all that fuel is trucked to the airport in the first place. Seems highly inefficient when such massive quantities of fuel would be needed on such a predictable, regular basis. It's not efficient to run pipelines to individual gas stations because the quantities are too small, but I'm surprised that airports -- especially major, busy ones like LGA -- wouldn't have better infrastructure in place. Then again, we are talking about LGA infrastructure....

o mikros

And now this report (based on a news story here) seems to indicate that my initial intuition was right: there is a pipeline that supplies jet fuel to both JFK and LGA. In that case, why did the traffic snarl cause delays when fuel trucks couldn't reach the airport?