Delta Air Lines (DL, Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson) plans to finish a USD3.5 billion redevelopment at New York La Guardia Airport earlier than the original completion date of 2026, Forbes, has reported.

As the coronavirus crisis keeps flights and airport passenger numbers low, estimated project costs for 2020 are down and the work is proceeding much faster.

“With the drop in demand, we actually see an opportunity to accelerate some of the construction,” Delta's chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, said during the virtual Wolfe Global Transportation Conference last week, something that will “lower the overall project cost but also deliver it much, much sooner.”

The redevelopment is a “massive project on a postage stamp size of land,” Jacobson said, covering 37 gates across four concourses. The first new concourse at La Guardia opened last November on land that was previously empty. “If we have an opportunity to bring down multiple concourses at the same time, we can actually save on that iterative construction process.”

The original plan foresaw one concourse being developed at a time, with the next one to open in 2022, but the newly accelerated plan could redevelop multiple concourses simultaneously because of the reduced activity at the gates.

Rather than wait to see what a post-coronavirus travel world might look like, Delta will mostly keep to the existing interior design plans, Jacobson said.

Financing for the project was made well before the virus, but at the end of March, Delta estimated spending USD675 million on La Guardia this year, down from a previous estimate made three months earlier of USD700 million. The carrier is “looking at different financing vehicles to finish it off” as accelerated work will add costs in the short term.

The total cost has risen from a projected USD3.3 billion anticipated in December to a USD3.5 billion estimate made in March.

Other airport projects are speeding up too, such as Delta's work at Los Angeles International and Salt Lake City. Redevelopments at Denver International and Singapore Changi are to be accelerated, according to Forbes, and runway construction at Hong Kong International has been brought forward.