New York - Air travel is poised to jet past another milestone in the New York metropolitan area - and the full force of the Christmas crush is still to come.
Someone arriving at John F Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday afternoon will be honoured as the 100-millionth passenger of the year at the region's three major airports, according to the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.
He or she will set a record for Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports. Together, they logged just under 100 million travellers last year and are on track to handle 104 million by the end of 2006, an increase of more than 28 percent in just four years.
The new statistic caps a series of recent records for the three airports. Last year's traffic set one, as did the more than 50,6 million passengers who trooped through in the first half of this year. Newark's passenger count hit a new high of 34.2 million at the weekend, surpassing a record set in 2000.
While a boon to airlines, the growth in air traffic can be a bane for travellers. JFK, Newark and LaGuardia rank among the nation's worst airports for on-time flights, although their delays aren't quite as bad as those at hubs in Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia.
"Understand that this is the most congested airspace in the world," Port Authority spokesperson Pasquale DiFulco said last month.
"We know growth is coming, and we only have so much airspace, and you can only fit so many planes in the sky."