With the rebuilding of New York's Laguardia Airport nearing the halfway mark, New York is taking on an even bigger task: making sense and modern operations out of the sprawling string of terminals, roads, expressways and garages that is its biggest airport, JFK.
A $13 billion plan announced last weekend by Gov. Cuomo calls for building two big new international terminals to replace six of the current eight terminals, creating a central hub connecting them, and upgrading AirTrain and road access to the terminals. That marks a reversal of the 1960s planning that saw airlines creating terminals of their own.
The two new terminals will each be built by private operators; the state's share of the cost will be about $3 billion, mostly spent on separating the spaghetti roadwork into two loops and upgrading the transit and vehicle access.
The existing Terminal 4, which handles many international airlines, will survive the reconstruction, as will American Airlines' Terminal 8; they are two of the newer existing terminals. The old TWA terminal, a landmark structure that's being turned into a hotel, will anchor a central hub between the two new terminals.
On the north side of the field, JetBlue will extend its fairly new Terminal 5 into space now occupied by Terminal 7 and the recently-demolished Terminal 6, and will host other airlines there. The new south terminal will be built by a Terminal One Group, a consortium of four international airlines—Lufthansa, Air France, Japan Airlines and Korean Air Lines. It will replace the existing T1, which the group owns, and will also use the footprint of the former Terminals 2 and 3.
Plans for the project, which promises free Wi-Fi and lots of chargers, are for construction to start in 2020 and be complete by 2025. The new terminals will have more gates than now exist, and more will be able to accommodate large planes such as the A380 and stretched 787s. There will not be any runway additions; the four existing runways are expected to be sufficient for 100 million passengers by later in the century.
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