LaGuardia Flight Delays Abound After Heat Reportedly 'Buckles' Runway (UPDATES)

LAGUARDIA AIRPORT, NY — Looks like LaGuardia Airport is trying to compete with Penn Station and the MTA subway system for most fragile transit infrastructure in NYC. Due to what the Federal Aviation Administration called a "pavement failure" on one of the airport's runways, both incoming and outgoing flights saw average delays of more than an hour as crews scrambled to fix the problem.

The affected runway was reopened around 2 p.m., according to a spokesperson for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs LaGuardia. And the airport's other runway was "fully operational and unaffected."

However, the FAA was still reporting major delays at LaGuardia as of 5:30 p.m. You can check the status of individual flights here.

Two different TV journalists who happened to be sitting inside planes on the LaGuardia tarmac started reporting on social media around 12:45 p.m. Wednesday that their flight crews were telling them the runway had "buckled" due to intense heat.

A Port Authority spokesperson told Patch in a statement that the runway was closed for more than an hour Wednesday so crews could "make repairs on a small portion of the runway," where "half inch of the epoxy on the top layer of the runway had broken off."

A full "ground stop" was initially put into effect at LaGuardia, but was soon lessened to a "traffic management program," according to the FAA. This mode was still in effect hours later.

At least 370 flights in and out of the under-construction Queens airport were delayed on Wednesday, according to the FlightAware plane-tracking website.

Over an hour and a half after the runway debacle began, airport officials issued a single tweet saying there "may be delays" at LaGuardia:

The high temperature at LaGuardia on Tuesday was 101 degrees, according to the National Weather Service — making it the hottest day ever recorded at the airport in the month of June. Wednesday afternoon was much cooler, around 80 degrees, the weather service said.

This is a developing story. Refresh the page for updates.