American Airlines (AA, Dallas/Fort Worth) president Scott Kirby says his airline would consider offering flights to the US West Coast from New York La Guardia should the airport's operator, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, revise a long-standing "perimeter rule" in effect there.

“What would happen if you did change the perimeter rule is, yes, we would fly transcon. We’d fly a lot of flights from LaGuardia to the West Coast, and we’d fly them with bigger aircraft,” Kirby was quoted by the Dallas News.

Since the 1950s, the Port Authority has had a "perimeter rule" in effect at La Guardia, the smallest of the New York area's three airports. Until 1984, the perimeter rule was informal and prohibited non-stop flights into or out of La Guardia to or from points more than 2,000 miles from the airport. However, in 1984, following a study, the Port Authority instituted a formal 1,500-mile perimeter rule but "grandfathered" service to Denver International, which is more than 1,600 miles from La Guardia. In addition, the rule excludes Saturday operations, though none of the airport's existing operators has exploited that loophole extensively.

The Port Authority has justified the rule on the grounds that it encourages business people, who it believes 'create considerably less airport congestion than vacationers', to use La Guardia while pushing the holiday market out to the larger New York Newark and New York JFK facilities.

The Wall Street Journal reports the Port Authority has already initiated studies into the impact of the lifting of the rule on air traffic, ticket prices, noise and operations at New York's airports. Once the studies are completed, expected in the next few months, the rule's abolishment would require approval from the bistate authority’s board of eleven commissioners.

Given its proximity to downtown Manhattan, slots at La Guardia have now an become extremely valuable asset with airlines expressing a strong desire to use them to their full potential. As such, there are concerns that with the rule's abolition, airlines will abandon their services to smaller communities in favour of more lucrative transcontinental services to cities such as Las Vegas Harry Reid, Los Angeles International, and San Francisco.

As La Guardia currently lacks a federal border-clearance facility, initial long haul operations would likely be limited to domestic US and regional Canadian flights, as well as flights to Ireland where US Customs and Border Protection (USCBP) has pre-clearance immigration facilities.

Other carriers that have expressed a keen interest in an expanded LaGuardia sphere of operations include United Airlines (UA, Chicago O'Hare), Delta Air Lines (DL, Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson), JetBlue Airways (B6, New York JFK), and Alaska Airlines (AS, Seattle Tacoma International).