Over 3,600 flights were cancelled yesterday due to the “Bomb Cyclone” that hit the Eastern seaboard. One flight that did make it, a Singapore Airlines A380, was forced to divert to a small airfield.
Singapore Airlines Flight 26, carrying 325 passengers, left Frankfurt before the brunt of the storm pummeled New York City. As the aircraft approached New York JFK, pilots were alerted that airport runways were closed due to whiteout conditions. The flight was instructed to divert to a small airport north of the city.
Lookout #HudsonValley – the #A380 is in the house! ✈️ #SWF #SWFairport #Singapore #Airbus380 #Diversion #AvGeeks #AvGeek #Blizzard2018 pic.twitter.com/kqAOiZQUUs
— NewYorkStewartInt’lAirport. Wear a Face Covering. (@SWFairport) January 4, 2018
Stewart Airport (SWF) is 60 miles north of New York City outside the town of Newburgh. Built as a military airfield, the airport still serves the U.S. Army but now accommodates commercial airliners as well.
Currently, the following airlines serve Stewart:
- Allegiant
- American Eagle
- Delta Connection
- JetBlue
- Norwegian Air
But the airport handled only 137,000 passengers last year. By comparison, JFK handed 59,000,000.
The aircraft landed safely. Authorities were present to process immigration and passengers were bussed to New York City. The airport has no jet bridges that can handle the double-decker A380, forcing passengers to alight onto the slick tarmac in icy conditions. But they made it home.
CONCLUSION
I love the juxtaposition of the world’s largest aircraft pulling up into an airport that sees mostly commuter jets. And don’t forget the aircraft has to get back to New York JFK. Too bad I cannot hop on the SWF-JFK flight. That would be fun…
> Read More: Singapore Airlines A380 Economy Class New York to Frankfurt Review
Stewart is a great little airport. Now that Norwegian Air flies there they can do immigration for diverted flights from the New York Metropolitan area.
Be careful. I was reading about this yesterday on some news blogs and people got REAL upset at calling Stewart small or tiny. They all liked to point out that it’s a military runway of 12,000 feet. Of course ignoring that the airport is actually very small 🙂
Fair point!
The terminals may be small but at 12000 feet it qualifies as a Runway long enough to land a B-52 or the space shuttle. The headline makes it sound like it’s landing at an airport designed for Cessnas and Piper’s.
Fly out of SWF all the time. They have jetbridges. And the runways are longer then JFK.
It’s not that they don’t have them – it’s that they can’t handle an A380’s size.
And I doubt LaGuardia does either but no one would call it tiny. For that matter I don’t recall seeing a380s at Newark.
just flew SWF-EDI a few months back and was my first time visiting SWF. It was truly remarkable for a tiny airport with barely a handful of flights to florida and key regional hubs would have multiple transatlantic flights to the British Isles.
It’s one thing for Ryanair to fly to middle of nowhere for 2 hour hops. it’s a whole different level of impressiveness to fly across the pond from tertiary airports like SWF.
I saw this on the news last night. Having dropped off and picked up family at SWF many times, I exclaimed that I was shocked they had a runway big enough to accommodate the A380 — completely forgetting that it started as a military airfield (I shouldn’t forget that, as helicopters and other military aircraft occasionally fly over my house presumably en route to Fort Drum).
For the record, nobody who has flown in or out of Stewart before will likely take issue with characterizing it as tiny, large runway aside.
Stewart is not a tiny airport. They have a very long runway that can accommodate the a380 and have more non-stop transatlantic flights than bigger airports like Pittsburgh or Hartford. If you think Stewart is “tiny”, how would you describe Saranac Lake airport in NY?
Wow first time I realize JFK handles only 29 mio annually. I am used to much bigger and busier airports in Asia.
What is surprising then that with such a low volume they seem incapable of providing a decent immigration/customs/security experience.
Should be very simple to improve on that.
according to wikipedia, JFK handled 59 million, not 29
Thanks. I was going off the linked CBS article.
Gosh can we all just resist this over dramatization? It used be called a severe winter storm! It s getting so tiresome to hear these childish descriptors.
This is the term meteorologists called it. Don’t blame the messenger!
I love this airport because it means that you can avoid JFK if you are planning on visiting the lower part of the Hudson Valley. It is also the airport that the US hostages arrived at after 444 days in Tehran, so it has that going for it.
“Stewart International may look tiny now, but its ticket to success is that it sits on plot of land that’s 7,000 acres bigger than New York’s vast Newark airport, one of New York’s premier airports that handles 40 million passengers a year.Jun 13, 2017”
So again, with a 12000 foot Runway, the terminal is tiny, not the airport, not the runways. In comparison Albany airport’s longest runway is 8500′ , laguardia’s longest is 7000 ft and even Newark is only 11,000 feet.
They base the C-5 Galaxy out of there. The taxiways are bigger than most runways.