Their gooses should be cooked!
Birdbrained federal bigwigs quietly shrunk the safety zone around a high-traffic La Guardia Airport runway to make way for a massive trash facility — a bird magnet that will put airliners on a crash course with engine-clogging fowl, The Post has learned.
By secretly reducing the zone, officials will allow flocks of garbage-grubbing birds to swarm within a half-mile of the runway — setting up another possible “Miracle on the Hudson” that may not have such a happy ending.
Canada geese were blamed for killing the engines of US Airways Flight 1549 and forcing Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger to land the jet in the Hudson River in January 2009.
The zone switch, made possible by the Federal Aviation Administration, was revealed in an explosive court case contesting the 100-foot-tall trash-transfer station set to open in 2013.
“Planes going into La Guardia and landing on that runway will have to fly over the top of that transfer station. Nothing attracts birds like garbage,” said former Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, a lawyer on the case.
The “protection zone” around La Guardia’s Runway 31 used to extend 2,500 feet across Flushing Bay, taking in the city’s proposed trash-transfer station site in College Point and therefore preventing its construction.
But 800 feet were mysteriously chopped from the zone by FAA execs, allowing the Department of Sanitation’s trash station to be built just outside its boundary, documents in the court case before the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals show.
“The way they have played games with the regulations in order to build this facility is an insult to public safety,” former National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Jim Hall told The Post.
“It’s the first time I remember where the FAA has permitted a hazard to be created where none previously existed.”
Despite the well-known risks posed by birds, Mayor Bloomberg’s administration has pushed ahead with the trash station project. And it has done so with the FAA’s blessing, the group Friends of La Guardia Airport says in the court brief.
When the feds initially green-lighted the city’s plans in 2006, the FAA even admitted that the station would be built in the 2,500-foot-long protection zone — a blatant violation of FAA rules, court papers say.
So by 2009 — it’s not clear to lawyers exactly when — the FAA shrank the zone to 1,700 feet, allowing the station to be built, documents show.
FAA officials referred questions to the US Department of Justice, which did not respond to a request for comment.