Long Island MacArthur Airport is getting nearly $1 million in federal money to fix a ground traffic bottleneck that has left the Islip, New York airport out of step with modern safety standards, part of a nationwide FAA push that gained new momentum under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

The nearly $955,000 grant from the Department of Transportation will fund construction of a new holding bay next to the airport's Taxiway G, a paved area 424 feet long and 130 feet wide where aircraft can pull off the taxiway to wait, run engine checks, or let other planes pass. Without it, planes back up on the taxiway itself, closer to active runways, a scenario the FAA has identified as a contributor to runway incursion risks.

The FAA has been pressing airports to fix exactly this kind of geometry problem since a wave of wrong-surface incidents in the 2000s prompted a major overhaul of taxiway design rules. Updated standards require airports to provide adequate holding areas so that no pilot is forced to sit on an active taxiway waiting for clearance. For many smaller commercial airports like MacArthur, those upgrades have sat in capital plans for years, waiting on funding.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided an extra $15 billion for airport improvements over five years, on top of the roughly $3.4 billion the FAA's Airport Improvement Program distributes annually. That surge in available dollars has allowed airports across the country to finally move long-deferred projects forward. This grant, awarded in March 2026, falls in the final year of that five-year window.

For MacArthur, the timing matters beyond safety compliance. The Town of Islip, which owns and operates the airport, has been working for years to position it as a real alternative to JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark for the roughly 2.8 million people living on Long Island, most of whom face long drives or transit trips to reach those airports. Carriers including Southwest, Frontier, and Breeze Airways have all served MacArthur in recent years, and the town has paired federal infrastructure grants with terminal renovations in a broader push to attract more service.

Construction on the new holding bay has not yet been publicly scheduled, and the town has not announced a completion target.