As air travel surges, runways to be closed over 6 days at Lehigh Valley International Airport

If you’re looking to catch a flight out of Lehigh Valley International Airport in September, your options are going to be a little limited.

By Sarah Cassi | For lehighvalleylive.com

The airport in Lehigh County is halting all air traffic for two stretches so crews can continue the airport’s four-phase $90 million runway improvement project. The first closure will last 72 hours Sept. 17-19, and the second will be 54 hours from Sept. 28 until 6 a.m. Sept. 30.

There will be no canceled flights; airlines have known about the closures, which are treated as “planned blizzards,” said Tom Stoudt, executive director of the Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority, which runs LVIA.

Travelers will remember there was a similar shutdown, for 52 hours in May 2019, for the same project.

During that time, the LVIA ticket counters were still open, the air traffic control tower was staffed to deal with emergencies and passing traffic, and the Newark ground shuttle still ran.

The runway project has received a number of grants to help pay for it, most recently an almost-$8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

“The funding will enable the airport to maintain its standard of safety and make improvements in infrastructure, which will help to bolster the Lehigh Valley’s economy,” U.S. Senator Bob Casey, D-PA, said in a release announcing the grant.

U.S. Rep. Susan Wild took a tour Thursday of the airport’s improvements, from watching a series of planes take off from the runway, to surveying the $22 million terminal connection project that just began this summer, to helping fight a purposely-set fire at a training plane.

The federal grant for the runway project “is about the economy of this area, it’s about not only passenger traffic, but the enormous freight traffic that comes through here.”

“This is my favorite airport, ever,” she added.

Talk about transportation and money brought up President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure plan.

Politico reported a vote on a bipartisan infrastructure deal could come as early as the week of July 19 in the Senate, and that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed if there is a bipartisan bill, it would be voted on before the Senate leaves for August recess.

At issue is a separate multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation bill, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said would be required for Democrats to pass the infrastructure legislation.

Wild called the reconciliation bill the “human infrastructure” legislation.

“I think there are a lot of important things in the reconciliation portion ... however, we absolutely have to get the hard infrastructure done. The Lehigh Valley is probably just a microcosm of the rest of the country, in terms of crumbling roads and bridges. It’s affecting our economy, it’s affecting people’s commutes,” she said while standing at one of the runway intersections at LVIA, the air traffic control tower in the background. “While I would like to see some key components of the human infrastructure portion done, the reconciliation, it’s not going to stop me from voting in favor of the hard infrastructure piece of it, because I think it’s so vital.”