NEW YORK — The opening of the AirTrain at Kennedy Airport, the $1.9-billion service meant to link the terminals to city subways, has been indefinitely postponed since a September derailment that killed a train operator, reports the Associated Press.
The service had been scheduled to connect the airport terminals to each other and to Howard Beach by the end of the year, and expand by the middle of next year to the Jamaica subway station.
But the Port Authority and the train’s builders, a consortium led by Montreal-based Bombardier Transportation, have not resumed testing since the derailment and have scheduled no target date for a new opening, said agency spokesman Pasquale DiFulco.
“The priority is determining what happened,” DiFulco said this week. He said the agency was awaiting results of its own and a National Transportation Safety Board investigation.
Three cars went off the tracks on Sept. 27 during a test run of the AirTrain after it went around a curve, authorities said, killing 23-year-old Kelvin DeBourgh Jr.
NTSB spokeswoman Lauren Peduzzi said the train was traveling at 50 to 55 mph at the time, and her agency was investigating what role the speed played.
She also said concrete blocks in the front and rear trains to approximate the weight of a full passenger load weren’t secured, and investigators were determining whether they shifted during the test run. The train operator was pinned by the blocks after the crash.
The NTSB hasn’t been at the site since a week after the crash and typically does not release final investigation reports for nine months to a year after an incident. Peduzzi said the agency hasn’t advised the Port Authority or Bombardier to suspend AirTrain testing.
Port Authority officials have predicted that 34,000 people a day would use the 8.1-mile light-rail system at Kennedy.
Transit advocates have said the light-rail system is crucial to the economy at Kennedy, an airport notorious for difficult access to Manhattan.
A study last month by the Center for an Urban Future, a policy research group, found that Kennedy and LaGuardia airports have lost 10,000 jobs in airport-related businesses since Sept. 11, a much greater percentage than hub airports in the rest of the country.
Jonathan Bowles, the researcher who prepared the study, said access to Kennedy is one factor behind the economic losses.
“People in New York City perceive Kennedy as a nightmare to get to and they’re right,” Bowles said.
DiFulco and Bombardier spokeswoman Carole Sharpe declined to comment on the separate investigation under way into the derailment. But DiFulco said the agency is closely looking at testing procedures before resuming.
“I think the rule you follow, if you’re going to err, you’re going to err on the side of being too cautious,” he said.