LaGuardia Runway 4/22 Closed Again Wednesday Night After Inspectors Find 2-Inch Pavement Depression

Since a sinkhole shut down LaGuardia's Runway 4/22 for two days around Memorial Day, the same stretch of pavement has now required emergency engineering attention a second time. This is the third closure of that runway since March, according to Newsday.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey closed Runway 4/22 at 5 p.m. Wednesday after airfield inspectors found a two-inch depression in pavement adjacent to the runway. Crews are conducting overnight testing, working to identify the cause, and performing stabilization work if warranted. The Port Authority's stated goal is to return the runway to service Thursday morning.

"There is no immediate safety concern and the runway is being closed proactively," the Port Authority said in a statement, as reported by CBS News.

What the Previous Closures Looked Like

The May 20 sinkhole closure is the most directly comparable event. That shutdown lasted until the evening of May 22. Newsday reported more than 1,000 flights were delayed or cancelled during those two days.

The runway's first closure this year came after the fatal March 22 collision between Air Canada Flight 8646 and a Port Authority fire truck. That closure lasted more than three full days.

Wednesday's shutdown is shorter in scope so far, running on a single runway overnight. The pattern, not any single event, is drawing attention: three closures of the same runway in roughly three months.

Delay Impact Wednesday

The Federal Aviation Administration slowed arrivals into LaGuardia because of the repair work, CBS News reported. According to FlightAware data cited by radio station WHMI, arrivals were delayed an average of 48 minutes as of Wednesday evening, though delays were described as decreasing. ABC 7, also cited by WHMI, reported 174 delays earlier in the day.

LaGuardia's other runway, 13/31, remained operational throughout.

The Structural Question Nobody Has Answered Yet

The cause of the May sinkhole remains under investigation, according to Newsday. The Port Authority has NOT publicly linked Wednesday's depression to the same underlying cause. If the ground beneath the runway has a drainage failure, a subsidence problem, or aging infrastructure driving repeated issues, patching the surface won't fix it.

The fact that a runway is producing a sinkhole and then, weeks later, a ground depression raises a fair question: what is causing repeated ground instability in the same location, and who is accountable if the underlying problem is not resolved?

The Port Authority's Position

Proactive closures are how airport safety is supposed to work. Inspectors found a two-inch depression during a routine airfield inspection and shut the runway down before any aircraft was at risk. That is textbook preventive maintenance, not negligence. The agency is not hiding the problem; it issued a public statement and gave travelers time to check their flight status.

The stronger version of the Port Authority's defense is that a two-inch depression in pavement adjacent to a runway is qualitatively different from a sinkhole under active taxiway pavement, and treating it with the same urgency actually demonstrates that inspection protocols are working.

"The inspection caught it" does not answer why the same runway keeps developing ground instability. Those are two different questions.

One Framing Note

Fox News headlined this as "the second time in weeks" the runway closed. Newsday's reporting is more precise: this is the third closure in approximately three months, with the March crash closure being the first. Fox's framing isn't inaccurate in isolation, but it understates the full pattern by omitting the March shutdown entirely.

What Happens Next

The Port Authority has not announced any broader structural assessment of the runway beyond overnight stabilization work. The May sinkhole investigation is still open. Whether Wednesday's depression is connected to that same investigation, or represents a separate and independent issue in the same pavement zone, is the central unresolved question. Until the Port Authority produces findings from the May inquiry, travelers and aviation regulators have no public basis for evaluating whether Wednesday's closure is an isolated event or a symptom of something larger.