LaGuardia Set To Receive Transcontinental Flights Yet Again

For years, travelers looking to travel nonstop from LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in New York City have been left with little to zero options. In fact, for almost 40 years, the longest flight out of LaGuardia has been a nonstop service to Denver, Colorado (DEN). Interestingly, however, no new service to airports like Denver can really be launched anymore. 
 

More specifically, LaGuardia, as is true for Reagan National Airport (DCA) in Washington, DC, has a perimeter rule in place since 1984, which limits the length of nonstop flights out of the airport to 1,500 miles. Denver is much farther than 1,500 miles from LaGuardia, but because that service had already been operated prior to 1984, the flight was grandfathered into the new era. Thus, while United, Southwest, and JetBlue still fly nonstop between LaGuardia and Denver daily, you never see flights to any city farther west at all. Until now. 

Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines has announced this week that it will be launching service to four cities in the Western United States from LaGuardia: Phoenix (PHX), Las Vegas (LAS), Los Angeles (LAX), and its major western hub in Salt Lake City (SLC). 

[LGA,PHX],[LGA,LAS],[LGA,LAX],[LGA,SLC]

There is a huge catch, however, which is that in order for any of these flights to fall within the perimeter rule, they can only be operated once weekly on Saturdays, which is exactly what the airline plans to do. 

All of these flights will be available to purchase as of Sunday, June 25, and all the flights except Phoenix will launch on September 9 (Phoenix will be delayed until October 14). As is common with many Delta flights out of LaGuardia, the airline will use the Airbus A220 across all four routes, specifically using the smaller Airbus A220-100 to Phoenix and Salt Lake City, and the larger Airbus A220-300 to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. 

These flights, and the Los Angeles flight in particular, mark the first transcontinental flights out of LaGuardia in quite a long time. Spirit previously flew Saturday-only service from LaGuardia to Los Angeles but as of 2023, does not fly that route. Delta, too, once flew once weekly to Los Angeles, but hasn't flown that route since 2006. Maintaining Saturday-only service will be difficult given the lack of business travel demand.

However, Delta CEO Ed Bastian has long stressed the record-breaking surge in leisure travel demand in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, and presumably, Delta believes it can fill planes full of leisure travelers operating once a week. Delta will be without competition on all four routes, but time will tell if operating a flight once weekly can gain enough market share and saturation to be profitable. 

Delta does maintain a considerable hub operation at LaGuardia with a large bank of connecting flights, particularly from smaller airports in the Eastern United States. While it's unclear how Delta will be scheduling these four new routes, with a large amount of connecting travel possibilities, these flights could present a viable alternative to transiting through much larger airports like Atlanta (ATL) or New York-JFK (JFK) on Saturdays. With the perimeter rule at LaGuardia not going anywhere anytime soon as it is key to preventing overcrowding and siphoning international traffic away to Newark (EWR) and JFK, once weekly Saturday transcontinental flights likely are here to stay for some time.