Any of you bus drivers working out of LGA today? this morning the winds were light they were landing 31 and dept 4....then they did a runway change to 13 for T/O and 22 for landing. All the bus drivers kept saying they needed 4...both runways are 7000 feet and the winds were under 5 kts....

So for someone like me who knows nothing about the bus except how to use the jumpseat....can anyone guess why this was an issue. I apologize for not knowing the exact wind, but i figure if more than one airline was having an issue, then this is something that happens often.

thanks for your expertise!

 

Maybe they already had dispatch run numbers for rwy04. Perhaps they did not want to wait for new data; which seems to take a while at Airways.

 

I believe runway 4 has less takeoff obstacles (water).

 

Frontier and Yo-nited were making the bigger stink over it....Delta too...sry Northwest

 

Shouldn't have been a performance issue, as the Bus is fairly sporty getting out of LGA. FWIW: 15knots is max tail wind for T.O.

 

The bus has a hard time out of SNA on a summer day. In contrast, I rode a 737-700 jumpseat with a full load and cruised right up to 410. I think the bus would benefit from one of those NG 737 wings.

 

Density Altitude, TO weights, climb gradient, obstacles, contract talks, merger talks,... could be ANY factors.

 

I think runway 13 had more Canadian Geese on it then runway 4.

 

Yeah, but if you take off on 4, you can land in the Hudson if you lose them both.

If you takeoff on 13, your only option is JFK, and we all know how screwed up THAT place is. :-)

---
But seriously, here what the METARs said this morning:

12n - KLGA 021551Z 03005KT 10SM FEW055 SCT250 28/13 A2986 RMK AO2 SLP112 T02830128
11am- KLGA 021451Z 05007KT 10SM FEW055 SCT250 27/13 A2987 RMK AO2 SLP114 T02670133 50002
10am- KLGA 021351Z 05006KT 10SM SCT250 26/14 A2987 RMK AO2 SLP116 T02560144
9am - KLGA 021251Z 09003KT 10SM BKN250 24/16 A2988 RMK AO2 SLP117 T02440156
8am - KLGA 021151Z VRB04KT 10SM SCT250 24/15 A2986 RMK AO2 SLP112 T02440150 10244 20211 53011

At Delta, the takeoff performance we get uses the latest *reported* weather, so while the tower might be reporting "winds variable at 3 kts" when people are taking the runway, the takeoff performance will use the reported wx from the last hour's report. Our performance will says, "RWY OVERWEIGHT FOR TAKEOFF" (or something similar) if you can't use it and not even give you any thrust setting/V speeds.

Believe me, the last thing everyone wants to do at LGA is gum up the works.

 

Yea I think I would probably take the Hudson over JFK