[PearlRiver]

Lots of old airports are a clusterfuck. Those places were built in the middle of nowhere 70-100 years ago but now find themselves practically inside the megacity.

Increased traffic and incredibly complicated approach routes does the rest.

[bmitc]

What does being in the middle of a metroplex have to do with air and plane traffic incidences? The only thing I can guess is it constraining the airport to grow or remodel itself leading to perhaps inefficiencies.

[tristanj]

Old airports have terrible runway design, the runways intersect (to save space) but this is dangerous and requires much more ATC coordination to manage. With modern runway design, if a plane takes off or lands out of sequence, it's unlikely to hit anything. With intersecting runways, that same accident becomes potentially fatal. These airports were also designed for smaller planes, fewer planes, and less passengers.

These issues are obvious to airport management, but airports cannot expand because nearby land is already allocated. The easiest option is to build a new airport, far from existing development.

Most of these airports were originally built far away from the city, but in the past half century the cities expanded so they new envelop the airport.

[rwmj]

Less room for error, can't build extra runway(s) to cope with increasing demand. The current Mentour Pilot video actually discusses this issue in some depth re one of Washington DC's airports.