What Goes into Redesigning an Entire Airport? We Went Behind the Scenes at Newark to See the Plan for Its Transformation

22.01.2025 - 13:55 / travelandleisure.com / John F.Kennedy / Rick Cotton

As many as 50 million passengers passed through Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) last year, rushing through the New Jersey airport’s terminals on their way to destinations near and far. But tucked into a back corner of the airport complex is a bank of unassuming offices where a team is playing a complicated game of Tetris, figuring out how to keep one of the country’s busiest airports functioning while simultaneously planning a massive overhaul to bring the tired infrastructure into the 21st century.

As part of its plan, first announced in October, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is working to completely replace Terminal B and the existing AirTrain while also enhancing Terminal C. All of which builds on the progress started with the airport’s new Terminal A, which opened in January 2023. But a plan that big comes with a lot of moving parts. 

“We’re trying to build a new terminal and create airspace and reconfigure all the roadways,” Ralph D'Apuzzo, the senior program director for aviation of the Newark redevelopment, told Travel + Leisure during a recent sit-down interview. ”What we’re going to do is build this in pieces … We’ve got to find ways of carving out areas that we could work as we need, which is going to be very, very challenging.”

The truth is modernizing Newark isn’t a want, it’s a need. In fact, at a certain point, Newark won’t be able to handle the traffic growth it's seeing without a major overhaul, said Aidan O’Donnell, the general manager of New Jersey airports at the Port Authority.

Courtesy of Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

“It's functionally deficient. We're bursting at the seams … And the demand is really there,” O’Donnell told T+L, adding, “We're hurling toward a capacity constraint and a capacity limitation, and that's something that we want to try to get ahead of.”

This isn’t the first major airport overhaul for the Port Authority — New York’s LaGuardia Airport (LGA) famously underwent a major transformation and John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) is in the midst of one now. And lessons have been learned.

“I think vehicular traffic was probably the takeaway number one, two, and three coming out of LaGuardia,” O’Donnell said. “What it caused us to do was make sure we have very robust traffic mitigations developed and tested before the construction actually started.”

In practice, that means working with the police department to understand where they need to add resources, pre-staging tow trucks in case someone breaks down, and understanding flight schedules to know when the airport is at its most crowded.

Ultimately, Port Authority Executive Director Rick Cotton told T+L the redevelopment “is about more than just building new terminals;