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Five Worst Airports
Power Trip · November 1, 2002

No airport is perfect. Each one has its flaws, whether it's Palm Beach International Airport's confusing access roads, Juneau International Airport's maddening fog or Las Vegas airport's omnipresent cigarette smoke.

Frequent travelers understand that. They deal with it.

But when an airport is so imperfect that we go out of our way to avoid it, when we would rather drive for hours to the next major city than bother with it and when we warn everyone we know to stay away, far, far away - well, those airports deserve special recognition.

I'm here to help. In a previous column, I told you about the five best airports for layovers. Now I'm going to talk about the five worst.

In order to identify the most flawed airports in the United States, we could look at a few numbers. In its most recent airport customer satisfaction survey, J.D. Power and Associates conceded that some big airports didn't do very well, including Los Angeles International, two New York airports and Miami. But it was vague, saying only that the airports rated below-average.

The other figure comes to us courtesy of the U.S. Department of Transportation, which rates airports by their on-time record. These numbers are only slightly more helpful than those offered by our J.D. Power friends. On-time arrival and departure statistics are broken out by month in difficult-to-read charts. A cursory glance at the tables suggests that at the problem airports about 20% of all flights arrive and depart more than 15 minutes late.

But you know more about bad airports than the pollsters and bureaucrats. That's why I've balanced your experiences at these airports against the data - and my own observations - in coming up with my list of the five worst airports.

Here we go:

1. New York's three major airports: Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR), LaGuardia Airport (LGA), John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK). It's a three-way tie for first! These are awful, awful airports any way you look at it. (I know I said my top five airports, so OK, I'm cheating a bit in my numbering system.) Newark is an enormous construction site, a dreadful, disorganized mess of a terminal. There's an almost-constant traffic jam in front of JFK, and I find it astounding that it recently opened another terminal (as if that would somehow make things better). But LaGuardia is in a class by itself, with its dark terminals, predictable delays and reports of lax security. Even New Yorkers, who are used to crowds and rude service, avoid this airport despite its proximity to Manhattan. The numbers are telling. The government reported that 20% of all flights arriving at LaGuardia and Newark were late. At JFK, almost a quarter of arriving flights were tardy.

I'm a regular user of all three airports. Among my favorite memories: spending the worst 24 hours of my life at JFK on a layover (my travel agent had made a serious scheduling error); waiting in a four-hour line one winter evening in LaGuardia (never again); and several mechanical delays at Newark that turned a two-hour flight into half a day of waiting and subsisting on really bad airport food. If I were calling the shots at the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, the agency responsible for these facilities, I'd tear them down and start over.

But I'm not the only one who feels that way. Of all the complaints from passengers about the New York airports - and there were many - the one from Mary Babcock stands out. She recalls the 1999 incident at Newark in which a passenger grew so irritated with a gate agent after waiting in a long line that he body-slammed him to the ground, breaking the airline employee's neck. The incident happened in an area that airport workers call "the dungeon." The employee survived, but the passenger prevailed in a resulting lawsuit filed by the airline against him. "I was there some months after the incident and could completely understand how it happened," says Babcock, a Port Austin, Mich. accountant.

2. Miami International Airport (MIA). What a mess. Just the thought of flying into Miami is enough to make me want to cancel my next trip. Like New York's infamous airports, Miami welcomes you with an almost-constant traffic jam. The bottleneck on Highway 836, which parallels one of the airport runways, never ends. I've driven along it at 3 a.m., and it's still bumper-to-bumper. Inside, the pandemonium continues. The check-in areas are dark, noisy, claustrophobia-inducing enclosures that make you wish for the soothing roar of a jet engine in your ear. Security lines are almost always long. Once in the departure area, your options are day-old, warmed-up hot dogs or day-old, warmed-up cinnamon rolls. And arrivals? Pray that your flight is diverted to Fort Lauderdale, because landing here is a pain. I often can't even find my way to the arrivals area - and I live in South Florida.

Diane Reinig dreads Miami International, but for other reasons. Several times a year she flies to Naples, Fla., from Newark, with a connection in Miami. (The Newark-to-Miami flight is one of the worst flights in the history of aviation, but that's a topic for another column.) "I dread it," Reinig says. Because of the terminal layout, she's forced to get processed through security again in Miami, which, given her short connection times, is difficult. "I'm doing it again later this year, and it's going to be a nightmare," she says.

3. San Jose International Airport (SJC). This was a surprise choice, since most of my memories of using San Jose International were relatively positive. Then again, most of my positive memories date back to 1984, when there were fewer people living in Silicon Valley, and the airport was really more of an airfield. SJC is just slightly better than the New York airports with its on-time statistics - about 17% of its arrivals and departures are more than 15 minutes late. But most of the criticism of SJC is that it simply wasn't built to accommodate the influx of travelers and the increase in security.

Passengers and flight attendants I talked with tell me that the hassles at SJC are the worst on the West Coast, if not in the country. "I really hate the C Terminal," complains Sue Bradford-Moore, a retired public servant who lives in San Jose. "Since Sept. 11, security lines have sometimes stretched the length of a football field, through baggage claim and out past the passenger pickup area." Sharon Wingler, a flight attendant for a major airline, wonders: "How can such an upscale part of the nation have an airport without jetways? Also, there are no restrooms past security, so think twice before ordering that double latte."

4. Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Friends don't let friends fly into LAX. That was the joke when I attended nearby UC Irvine 15 years ago. My grandmother, who lived less than 30 miles away from Los Angeles International, refused to pick me up when my flight arrived there. But it's not a joke anymore in overcrowded Los Angeles, where alternate airports are being expanded to the point where they're big enough to be classified a primary airport - just take a look at Ontario International Airport - and planners are pushing to turn old military airfields like El Toro Marine Base into a commercial airfield. LAX is simply too big for its own good.

Getting there is difficult at any hour (the 405 freeway is usually a parking lot in front of LAX). The circular design by architect William Pereira, the man who coincidentally also masterminded my alma mater's campus, isn't well-suited to a desperately needed expansion. Neither is the fact that almost every inch of real estate around Los Angeles International is built up. "LAX is oppressive," says traveler Pete Maclean. "It's dingy and dilapidated, noisy and overcrowded, unfriendly and with poor facilities."

5. Boston Logan International Airport (BOS). The usual complaints here: big crowds, long lines, never-ending construction. Sound familiar? The on-time numbers at BOS are better than its competitors in this category (the most recent numbers say only 15% of its flights left late) and that kept the airport from being ranked higher. I generally prefer one of Boston's alternate airports - Providence, R.I., or even Hartford, Conn. When I think back on all the times I've flown into BOS, I would compare each one to the trash compactor scene in "Star Wars", where I had this overwhelming urge to get out as quickly as possible. "It's the worst airport ever," agrees Jeffrey Filipov, a consultant who lives in Boston. "It's old, squeaky, dirty, small, cramped, has no facilities or shops."

If this is the first column about airports you've read with my name on it, you're probably wondering why I'm being so critical. One reader recently called me a "poor soul" for being so crabby. Aw, shucks. As a friendly reminder, not only did I write an upbeat column about the best airports for a layover, I have another coming on the best alternate airports a traveler could use. I hope they balance out these harsh words.

And another thing: I don't think all is lost for the airports I mentioned here. Before San Francisco's new international terminal and soon-to-be opened train connection to downtown, I would have included SFO on this list. Now it merits a mention on my list of the best airport for a layover. Many of the airports I mentioned have master plans to address some of the problems I mentioned. So even though the terminals have problems, the problems aren't terminal.

Christopher Elliott is a travel writer based in Key Largo, Fla. This column also appeared on Microsoft's bCentral site.