Why Newark Airport Sucks So Much | Wendover Productions

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. The award-winning American Airlines Advantage Program rewards more than travel. It takes your whole life to new heights. Earn miles when you fly, as well as with thousands of your favorite brands. And then redeem those miles for flights, upgrades, and experiences worldwide. Advantage members also enjoy earlier boarding and free high-speed Wi-Fi in flight. Be free and start earning towards your next adventure at AA.com slash Spotify. It's football season, and you can now get almost anything you need for Game Day delivered

1:04with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a running back delivered, but you can get baby-back ribs delivered. A strong defense? No. A strong deodorant? Yes. The Six Pack of Abs? No. Six pack of beer? Yes. Get almost almost anything for Game Day delivered with Uber Eats. Official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. Alcohol 21 plus in Inselect City's Product Availability Various By Regency App for Details. Newark Airport sucks. That's not just an opinion. That's an objective characterization backed by data. Each year, the FAA publishes an on-time ranking of 30 major American airports, and each year, Newark Airport sits near the very bottom. In 2015, it was 3rd to last. In 2016, last. 2017, last again, then 2nd to last, 2nd to last again, then back to dead last once again in 2020. Since then, Newark's ranking has risen, reaching a high of 17th out of 30 in 2024,

2:05but this was done largely not through Newark Improving, but rather other airports getting worse. Various publications have attempted to evaluate airport quality in more nuanced ways, looking beyond simple on time ratings and incorporating a wider spectrum of qualitative and quantitative metrics to create an index score ranking major airports. According to these, when you look at an airport as more than just a machine that's on time or not, Newark still sucks. According to the Wall Street Journal's 2023 large airport rankings, Newark is worst. According to AirHelps 2025, Index Score of airports, Newark is worst, at least in America. According to JD Powers 2024 North American Airport Satisfaction Study, Newark is worst once again. In the overwhelming complexity of the air transport world, with so many different things that can go wrong, it's rather remarkable that this specific airport manages to be so consistently superlatively bad.

3:06It indicates that something is fundamentally structurally wrong with the design of Newark airports. A glimpse deeper at the data starts an explanation. Newark is never great, but through each year there's an ebb and flow from bad to terrible with a clear pattern. October, for example, is consistently its smoothest month. Over the past four years, it's earned an average on time ranking of 15th out of the 30 major American airports. March is also alright at an average of 18th. But what the data really demonstrates is that there are two core months of chaos, June and July. Within these months, an average of just 65% and 62% of flights arrive in the park from Newark on time. An absolutely catastrophic level of consistency. And this makes perfect sense. So the west of New York City are the Appalachian Mountains. They're not America's most formidable peaks, having spent hundreds of millions of years eroding into their lumpy dollar form, but they're significant enough to affect the

4:07region's weather patterns. The prevailing wind pattern in North America is west to east, and this force pushes warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico over the Appalachians. As this air collides with the topography, it's forced upward into higher altitudes. At higher altitudes, temperatures are cooler, and as that ascendant air cools down, it loses its capacity to hold as much moisture. So the moisture condenses together, and that's what forms clouds. As those clouds drift eastward, they interact with warm afternoon air and cool sea breeze from the Atlantic, and this sort of atmospheric instability is what triggers thunderstorms. Thunderstorms and airports are not compatible. Airports can at least partially operate in a lot of weather conditions, snow, wind, rain, fog, but thunderstorms bring wind with a dangerous mix of intensity and unpredictability. It changes direction or strength rapidly, which could catch a pilot off guard in those critical moments before touchdown. So when a thunderstorm is at or near an airport, inbound flights often have to hold, go

5:11around, or divert, while outbound flights are often left awaiting for the cell to blow through. But then there's the matter of ground operations. Lightning strikes are, of course, dangerous to humans, and while there is no single national standard, Newark, like most US airports, shuts down baggage handling, pushback, and any other operation that involves... When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen, and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching, and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at ND.com slash podcast. That's ND.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? Let's head to the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. The award-winning American Airlines Advantage Program rewards more than travel. It takes your whole life to new heights. Earn miles when you fly, as well as with thousands of your favorite brands.

6:14And then redeem those miles for flights, upgrades, and experiences worldwide. Advantage members also enjoy earlier boarding and free high-speed Wi-Fi in flight. Stay for free and start earning towards your next adventure at AA.com slash Spotify. It's football season, and you can now get almost anything you need for Game Day delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a running back delivered, but you can get baby-back ribs delivered. A strong defense? No. A strong deodorant? Yes. The Six Pack of Abs? No. Six pack of beer? Yes. Get almost almost anything for Game Day delivered with Uber Eats. Official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. Alcohol 21 Plus and Inselect City's product availability varies by agency app for details. Workers on the ramp when a lightning strike is detected within its vicinity. Even a 20-minute shutdown can have cascading effects for the rest of the day, both at New Work and in the rest of an airline's network. But New Work isn't New York City's only airport.

7:15There's also La Guaradi and JFK near miles away. But while they're on time ratings are not great, often well below the national average, they're certainly consistently better than New York's. Geography can explain this, at least in part. JFK in particular benefits from its eastward position on Jamaica Bay right near the Atlantic Ocean. Storms track from west to east and therefore tend to moderate an intensity by the time they reach the airport and the cooler sea breeze also dulls their strength. But their differences in performance are also explained by what they look like on the ground. Comparing the airports to scale, New York is small. JFK is busier than Newark, but even compared to its closest equivalent in passenger numbers, Houston and San Francisco, the airfield is dwarfed. Relative to its busyness, Newark just doesn't have a lot of space and this leads to some very real operational bottlenecks. It has three runways, but it can't really operate the same way most three runway airports do. In normal conditions, Newark tends to use the runway on the right for arrivals and the

8:17one on the left for departures. But this pair sits only 950 feet or 290 meters apart, which in airport terms is very little. With such proximity, the FAA does not allow for fully independent operations. One's departures or arrivals need to be coordinated with the others. If an aircraft is landing, another might not be able to land on the runway next to it at the same time, or there are extra burdens of communication, or there are minimum vertical separation requirements that affect timing. The exact restrictions range depending on wind, visibility, weather, and more, but it sums up to the runways being able to be used less than they would if not for their close proximity, which restricts capacity. JFK for example also has parallel runways, but their thousands more feet separated from each other, which allows them to operate independently, or at least with fewer restrictions in the same weather conditions. Newark does have a crosswind runway as well, but considering that intersects with the two main runways, a maximum of just two runways can be used at any given time.

9:17And considering the main two have restricted capacity, Newark, despite having three, essentially operates with less theoretical capacity than of some two runway airports. But even once an aircraft gets slotted into the landing sequence and touches down, Newark's design still leads to yet more delays. The most common landing pattern is from the north on the runway to the east, meaning an aircraft will clear on one of these three high-speed taxiways. From there, all the terminals are to the west, meaning the aircraft has to cross this runway. Crossing the runway requires careful coordination with air traffic control in order to sequence the taxi movements between departures. This process further limits the capacity of the departing runway and holds up almost every inbound aircraft by a matter of minutes. Then aircraft approach the terminal, but the constraints are far from over. After peak times, like mid-afternoon into early evening, the gates are tightly scheduled with little slack in capacity. There's not much room for terminals at the airports, which means it just doesn't have any surplus of parking positions.

10:20Newark has the exact number it needs since gate capacity is one of the major constraints that dictates the schedule. So if something goes wrong, and things do go wrong, and outbound flights are delayed, there might be a backup where inbound aircraft can't get access to the gates they're supposed to. That was one of the key contributing causes to the chaos of July 14th, 2025. It was a classic bad day at Newark. A particularly fierce bout of those frequent afternoon thunderstorms rolled through and shut down the ramp for large portions of the afternoon and early evening. There were all sorts of instances of aircraft like this, N667UA, a United Airlines 767. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen, and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching, and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at ND.com slash podcast.

11:23That's ND.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. The award-winning American Airlines Advantage Program rewards more than travel. It takes your whole life to new heights. Earn miles when you fly, as well as with thousands of your favorite brands. And then redeem those miles for flights, upgrades, and experiences worldwide. Advantage members also enjoy earlier boarding and free high-speed Wi-Fi in flight. Stay for free and start earning towards your next adventure at AA.com slash Spotify. It's football season, and you can now get almost anything you need for Game Day delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a running back delivered, but you can get baby-back ribs delivered. A strong defense? No. A strong deodorant? Yes. The Six Pack of Abs? No. Six pack of beer? Yes. Get almost almost anything for Game Day delivered with Uber Eats. Official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL.

12:25Order now. Alcohol 21 Plus in Inselect City's product availability varies by Regency app for details. That had just flown nine hours and 22 minutes from Naples, Italy, landing slightly early at 607 pm. It vacated the runway on Taxiway November, turned north across the other runway, then stopped here at about 6.13 pm as it waited for its gate to clear up. It did not move again until 9.58 pm. It taxed a bit, stopped for 10 minutes, taxed a few hundred feet further, stopped for 15 minutes, then finally taxed to its gate, opening its door for hours and 21 minutes after landing. Of course, for every moment N667 UA was sitting on that Taxiway not moving, it was also not operating the next flight it was scheduled for, UA 967, a return flight back to Naples, Italy. With the aircraft so delayed getting to the gates, it would have been delayed so much getting out that the flight back to Newark the next day would also get delayed, and that would cause a delay for its next flight.

13:26It would have caused such a cascade that the airline decided it was better to just cancel. So the fact that there wasn't a gate led to a hundred and something passengers not going to Naples, scrambling to get a seat on the next day's flight, which definitely didn't have enough seats to fit all of them, forcing many to take days to take stercutious routes to their now shortened visits to the Malfi coast. Many sorts of cascading delays can occur at any airports, but the constraints at Newark amplify issues. The data reflects this. The month to month ranking is, of course, relative to other major airports, and almost all major airports in the US deal with summer thunderstorms and winter weather to at least some degree. Newark is able to provide more stable operations in the portions of spring and fall that tend to lack snow or thunderstorms, but when weather or other issues do occur, it's less resilient than most airports and operations melt down. So essentially, Newark's core flaw is that it's constraints amplify other issues. But also, the air traffic control doesn't work right.

14:28In recent months, incidents involving momentary data blackouts at Newark's Tracon facility have reached headlines, but the issues have been long running. Newark's airspace is some of the most complex in the entire world. There's Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK, the major commercial airports, but then there's Teerboro, one of the busiest private jet airports in the entire world, just 10 miles or 16 kilometers from Newark, sitting squarely in its approach path. Then there are huge amounts of helicopter traffic to and from Manhattan, sightseeing flights, airport shuttles, private flights for wealthy individuals commuting to and from their weekend residents in Westchester County on the Hamptons. There are commercial sea planes operating from the East River, there's a general aviation corridor over the Hudson, there's a more minor commercial airport just north of the city in Westchester, and there's plenty of higher altitude overflight navigating through the most densely populated region in America. Keeping all these operations organized requires an incredible degree of concentration and expertise by the air traffic controllers. Considering how close aircraft operate to each other, just a moment's lapse can lead

15:31to catastrophe. Air traffic control already requires years of intense training, but gaining the skill to work Newark's airspace takes yet more years. Typically people only enter the job after long careers at other sectors. Traycon, in particular, is the ATC function focused on the phase of flight between cruise and landing or takeoff. It's about routing a plane out of the busy airspace after takeoff or lining it up for landing when in-bounds. Until recently, the Newark controllers worked out of a facility 10 miles away from the airport in Long Island City, housing the operations for all Newark City area Traycon sectors. But the FAA was dealing with chronic staffing shortages. Only 33 controllers were certified to work the airspace out of the 63 theoretically demanded. To keep operations safe, a given controller can only work so many aircraft at a given time, so flights were having to hold at their origins, waiting for a slot as the FAA reduced the throughput of the airspace to meet the staffing limitations. But the FAA…

16:31When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use indeed sponsor jobs. Use your job posts the boost it needs to be seen, and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsor jobs. To award winning American Airlines Advantage program rewards more than travel. It takes your whole life to new heights. Earn miles when you fly, as well as with thousands of your favorite brands. And then redeem those miles for flights, upgrades, and experiences worldwide. Advantage members also enjoy earlier boarding and free high speed Wi-Fi in flight. Join for free and start earning towards your next adventure at AA.com slash Spotify. It's football season, and you can now get almost anything you need for game day delivered

17:35with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a running back delivered, but you can get baby back ribs delivered. A strong defense? No. A strong deodorant? Yes. The six pack of abs? No. Six pack of beer? Yes. Get almost almost anything for game day delivered with Uber Eats. Official on demand food delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. A total 21 plus in Inselect City's product availability varies by agency app for details. They thought they had a fix. They'd move the facility to fill the Delphia. There was no real need for proximity. All the controllers did was look at screens, so theoretically they should have been able to do the job just as well out of the existing Philadelphia Traycon facility. The logic was that it was going to be easier to grow the roster in Philadelphia. They had better success rates at training controllers for new air spaces, and the pay rates for the more complex Newark airspace would be attractive. That's because it'd be more than the pay for Philadelphia area airspace, and because cost of living was lower than in Long Island City. In order to train new controllers though, they needed the existing Newark sector controllers

18:38in Philadelphia. The FAA showered the 33 with bonuses and incentives, but many were unwilling to operate their families and only 17 voluntarily agreed to the move. So eventually, the FAA just mandated it. They'd go to Philadelphia, or they'd lose their jobs. Still then, not all agreed, so the new Newark Traycon facility started operations on June 20th, 2024, with just 24 trained controllers. The airspace capacity was therefore constrained, yet further. But then, there were the blackouts. You see, in order for Philadelphia's Traycon facility to get access to the Newark area radar the controller stare at all day, a data feed was set up from the old Long Island City facility, which itself got the data from the airport itself via another data feed. Reportedly, the data traveled via an old copper telecom wire with no redundancy, and some issue with this data was the root cause of a series of incidents where the data just disappeared.

19:40Controllers could still talk to pilots via the radios, but they had no idea what to tell them since they didn't know where any planes were. In the most high-profile incident, Newark Traycon controllers lacked access to their radar screens for as long as 90 seconds. While luckily no aircraft incidents occurred, considering the congestion in the airspace, it was well within the realm of possibility. The safety implications of these incidents is no doubt concerning, but from a practical perspective, it also amplified Newark's issues yet further. A number of controllers elected to take trauma leave. For years, they've been forced to work massive amounts of overtime with a job that even in the best conditions is extremely stressful and mentally demanding, and for many, these brushes with disaster were seemingly the straw that broke the camel's back, and they decided they'd had enough. They just needed a break. The airtruck control crisis was occurring at a time when Newark was already under constraint. One of its two main runways was undergoing maintenance, meaning the airport had to fit both departures and arrivals onto one single runway, massively reducing capacity

20:45yet further. As this interacted with the start of the summer thunderstorm season, the airport had an absolutely catastrophic May 2025 that reached global headlines. But really the airport's core issue is not that hard to understand. It's just not designed to accommodate the level of traffic that it does. It's an outdated, overstressed piece of infrastructure, and so it just makes perfect sense that all it takes is one small issue for operations to completely, catastrophically, melt down. Many of you watching this video likely have an interest in aviation and might even be interested in building a career in the field. Many of the best, highest-paying jobs in the field require a strong knowledge foundation in science, technology, engineering, and math, but learning these subjects can be tough, especially outside formal education. That's why I'd recommend our sponsor, Brilliant. They have a catalog of STEM courses that are perfect for advancing your understanding of subjects like math, or computer science, or data analytics.

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