EWR Airline Competition Plan Page 8
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Downtown Heliport / John F. Kennedy Int’l. Airport / LaGuardia Airport / Newark Int’l. Airport / Teterboro Airport
context of our regional role and mission, and our overall approach to ensuring a
pleasurable travel experience for the public.
Our region continues to enjoy the greatest choices of air travel through the largest and
most diverse airport system in the world. These choices include over 100 air carriers (31
US-flag carriers and 71 foreign-flag) providing over 1.4 million flights to over 180 non-
stop destinations. They serve 92 million passengers and handle 2.8 million tons of cargo
and 331,000 tons of mail annually. In addition to maintaining and improving competition
among airlines, ensuring a pleasurable traveling experience for the public also requires a
focus on service excellence and adequate capacity.
Service Excellence - The Port Authority has successfully fostered a public/private
partnership that has provided enormous investments in new facilities for the region’s
airport system. The Port Authority will also build on the background of its joint
efforts with JD Power and Associates, and focus on developing, implementing,
measuring and enforcing compliance with service standards for itself, and for the
various services delivered by the airlines, contractors, tenants and concessionaires, in
the operation of these facilities. This will require a business strategy of gaining and
asserting greater influence over service delivery by the private sector.
An example of The Port Authority’s very active role in ensuring service excellence is
its issuance of a moratorium on additional flights at LGA when faced with a potential
increase of over 600 flights that would be possible as a result of AIR-21. The Port
Authority took a leadership position and informed the airlines that it would not allow
the airport to reach a gridlocked state and that if the airlines would not voluntarily
agree to shift flights the Port Authority may take further action. The resulting
inaction by the airlines forced the Port Authority to require them to move flights from
certain time slots where such activity exceeded the airport’s capacity. It was also
recommended that airlines shift those flights to JFK. The FAA and the Port
Authority are now in the process of investigating the use of a lottery system to
allocate flights during certain time periods and over the longer-term is researching the
use of other methods such as congestion pricing. As usual the Port Authority looks
forward to the input and assistance of the FAA and DOT during this process to ensure
service excellence for the airport patron is maintained.
Adequate Capacity - The Port Authority is addressing capacity issues at all three of
its commercial aviation airports focusing on the four key elements of air travel:
Landside Capacity, Terminal Capacity, Airside and Airspace Capacity. During the
last decade passenger growth at EWR has risen over 60 percent to nearly 35 million
air passengers. The Port Authority is addressing landside and terminal capacity
constraints resulting from that dramatic growth with significant investments both by
the airlines and the Port Authority. The redevelopment program will include the
Continental Airlines Global Gateway Project at Terminal C, two new parking
garages, new Central Terminal Area roadways, new roadway connections from the
southern part of the airport, additional aircraft expansions to the fuel farm, the
extension of the Monorail to the Northeast Corridor’s NJ Transit and Amtrak rail