New Orleans Airport Expansion Plan Put on Hold

St. Charles Parish and Kenner residents concerned about the further expansion of Louis Armstrong International Airport into the parish have a little breathing room.

Sean Hunter, the airport's interim director, said Monday that the airport, which in early 2005 announced it would study the possibility of building a new airport in the Bonnet Carré Spillway near Montz, said all expansion plans are on hold for now.

"We're putting all of our efforts towards building traffic to pre-Katrina levels, and while that's happening we're not going to be looking at expansion."

Hunter made the remarks after addressing the St. Charles Parish Council about air traffic at the airport.

New Orleans officials, who had long made building a second north-south runway in St. Charles' LaBranche Wetlands the airport's top construction priority, expanded their options in May 2005, when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin announced that the city would consider building a new airport either in the spillway or in eastern New Orleans.

The airport is owned by New Orleans, but located in Kenner and St. Charles Parish. The current east-west runway is located in St. Charles.

To J.P. and Lynda Stevens, the news was horrifying. In 2003, the couple had moved to Montz from the Fairfield subdivision in St. Rose. The subdivision was targeted by the airport for purchase because the projected noise levels for traffic on the new runway would cause health risks to anyone in the neighborhood.

"We were pretty upset when we heard that it might follow us here," J.P. Stevens said.

After Nagin's announcement, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped work on the environmental impact study of the LaBranche runway option, until the city makes up its mind.

Hunter said Monday that all of the airport's options are still on the table, and that the airport will look at the issues anew when traffic returns to normal.

When it does, Kenner and St. Charles officials, long opposed to the airport's expansion, could rev up their opposition again.

But Hunter said new technology may give the airport more breathing room, even after traffic levels return to the pre-Katrina levels of 10 million passengers per year.

"With better avionics that are in the pipeline, there can be less separation between aircraft, which means we can land more planes on the runway in the same amount of time," he said. "That may give us more time to make a decision."

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