What is this?
This is LaGuardia Airport (LGA).
It has two runways. They cross each other.
Each runway has a different name for each direction. If a plane is pointed northeast on this runway, it is on Runway 4. If it is pointed southwest on the same runway, it is on Runway 22.
The numbers are the runway's compass direction. Runway 4 is about 40 degrees, and Runway 22 is about 220 degrees.
Planes landing on Runway 4 come from the southwest. They fly in a straight line from south Brooklyn to the runway.
On the way, they fly over Dyker Heights, Borough Park, Kensington, Prospect Park, Prospect Heights, Bed-Stuy, Maspeth, Woodside, and Jackson Heights.
They fly pretty low. Over Prospect Park, they're about 2,000 feet.
How LGA picks the runway
They mostly decide using the wind.
Air traffic controllers prefer to have planes take off and land facing into the wind. Headwind slows down a landing plane, so it needs less runway. They avoid landing planes with the wind coming behind them.
So when the wind blows from the northeast, planes almost always land on Runway 4. When it blows from the southwest, they almost never do.
When there is little wind, other things decide, like how busy the airport is and which runways JFK is using.
How often Runway 4 is used
Planes land on Runway 4 about 25% of the time between 6 AM and midnight.
Runway 22 is the most common landing runway. Planes land there about half the time.
The US Open
The US Open is a tennis tournament played in Flushing Meadows, right next to LGA.
During the US Open, air traffic controllers and airline pilots change how planes take off from LGA, so planes don't fly over the stadium during the tennis games.
Planes taking off from Runway 13 fly a departure route that keeps them away from the stadium. They climb out toward the southeast, then turn left to the northeast. The route is called the TNNIS departure, and it was created specifically for the US Open.
During the US Open, planes land on Runway 4 less often than usual. The model's predictions are slightly more accurate when it knows whether the US Open is happening.
How does this site make predictions?
This site keeps checking the latest weather forecast and which runways are in use right now. A model trained on years of past flights takes those as inputs, along with whether the US Open is happening, and predicts the chance that planes land on Runway 4 for each hour of the next 7 days.