Newark Airport, circa 1989, 2:00 a.m. – Expecting to be arrested at any moment, I walked through a gate in a cyclone fence and approached the locked door at the bottom of the control tower for Newark Airport. My hand was shaking as I pressed the button on the call box.
I knew that the bigwigs at the Port Authority of NY/NJ would love for the agency’s police to arrest me, in light of how much trouble my activist group and I were giving them and how much positive press we were getting in the New York media. My arrest probably would make the news and set back our cause and maybe my corporate career.
But as the air traffic controllers had assured me earlier that day, nothing untoward happened. One of the controllers came down to open the door and bring me up to the control room, in violation of rules. Neither the cops nor the bigwigs ever found out.
That night has come to mind in reading about the current traffic control mess at Newark International Airport, an airport that I had the misery of flying out of for the ten years I lived in Northern New Jersey. Almost as miserable were the times that I flew out of JFK.
As with control towers at other airports, the Newark control tower only controls planes on final approach, on takeoff, and on the tarmac. Air traffic at higher altitudes over the New York region used to be controlled solely by the TRACON facility on Long Island. Some of that space has now been assigned to the TRACON in Philadelphia, including traffic in the Newark air space, which encompasses not only Newark Airport but also Teterboro and Morristown airports.
An aside: Teterboro, which caters to corporate jets, brings back a sad memory. A woman who used to work for me was killed when she was a passenger on a corporate jet took that off from Teterboro and crashed into a hillside.
Sometimes, I was able to take a limousine to and from Newark, thus avoiding the agony of driving to the airport. Other times, I had to drive and park in the long-term lot, which was littered, seedy and surrounded by concertina wire.
One return flight to Newark Airport was memorable. Arriving at the airport in the wee hours of the morning after long flight delays, I had to take a shuttle bus to the long-term lot to get my car and drive home. I was the only passenger on the decrepit bus, which was a former city bus and way past its life expectancy. As the bus belched smoke and lurched down an aisle in the long-term lot, the driver pointed to an expensive Mercedes that was parked illegally with its rear end sticking into the aisle. Giving an evil laugh, he said, “Watch this!” With that, he clipped the rear end of the Mercedes, knocking off a part. “We’ve been doing this all night,” he chortled.
Welcome to New Jersey!
This isn’t bragging but a background fact: I was active in a number of causes in the Garden State and was recognized for my efforts by a New Jersey newspaper, which designated me as the “Community Service Volunteer of the Year” and featured me on its Sunday front page. What had brought me to the control tower that evening was a cause that involved taking on the powerful Port Authority and the even more powerful Federal Aviation Administration.
The saga began when passenger jets suddenly began flying over the house that my wife and I owned in Basking Ridge, NJ, a pretty town that is 19 miles west of Newark Airport. You might find it hard to believe, but the noise was so incessant and loud that I tried sleeping in the basement to escape it. At the time, most passenger jets had Stage II engines, which were considerably louder than the more advanced Stage III engines that would eventually replace them.
Subsequent news reports explained that the FAA in conjunction with the Port Authority had arbitrarily changed departure routes that had been in effect ever since Newark Airport was established. With the old route, planes taking off to the southeast would gain altitude over industrialized areas and water before turning west. With the new route, they would turn west soon after takeoff and gain altitude over residential areas.
Tens of thousands of residents in a wide swath of the most densely populated state in the nation were awakened to constant thunder—and also to unburned aviation fuel coating their patio furniture and gardens. This wasn’t a case of people moving under existing air traffic and then complaining about the noise and pollution. It was a case of the air traffic being moved over heretofore serene areas for no compelling reason.
One of the most badly affected towns was Westfield, directly west of the airport. The leafy town has a median household income today of $212,000 and is home to many influential people who commute to work in Manhattan. One of the residents at the time was a very talented and well-connected woman from the New York media who became the communications director of the group that I would form to roll back the routes.
When I would be on the phone with her and other Westfield residents, the noise was so loud at their homes that we’d have to pause our conversation until a plane passed.
Literally, in one fell swoop, people had their quality of life and property values ruined.
Why did the FAA do this?
Ostensibly, to reduce delays at the airport and address a longstanding problem of not enough runway capacity, gates and air space. But the Band-Aid didn’t work. Not only that, but the FAA didn’t take into consideration the impact on people on the ground. The arrogant bureaucrats at the FAA designed routes as if New Jersey and New York were uninhabited. And the equally arrogant bureaucrats at the Port Authority had no qualms about sticking it to New Jersey.
They didn’t realize, however, that they were sticking it to some of the wealthiest, smartest and most powerful people in the nation, many of whom joined my group and donated the funds to retain our own air traffic experts. Some were big donors to politicians of both parties, and many were frequent fliers who had a self-interest in fixing the problems at Newark.
My late-night visit to the Newark tower was part of our effort to get data to counter the claims being made by the FAA and to develop better alternatives.
Almost the entire New Jersey congressional delegation would testify with me about the issue of the new routes before the aviation subcommittee on Capitol Hill. I’ve kept a front page of the Newark Star-Ledger showing me standing at the hearing next to Senator Bill Bradley, one of the best guys to ever serve in Washington.
Months earlier, I had met privately with the chairman of the subcommittee, a congressman from Minnesota who had a drinking problem and was inebriated at the time.
We eventually got relief for Westfield by redirecting the takeoffs back to industrialized areas, and we got relief for everyone else by forcing the Port Authority to agree to an expedited ban on Stage II aircraft at Newark, La Guardia and JFK. Because so much air traffic went into New York, this ended up being a de facto ban on Stage II aircraft across the nation and resulted in the airline industry converting to Stage III engines in short order.
I am not surprised that Newark Airport is still a mess 36 years later and has even worse delays and more dangerous air space, so much so that the FAA has had to reduce the number of flights at the airport as a stopgap measure.
The root problem is that a state with 9.2 million people doesn’t have a major airport of its own. It has had to rely on the hidebound, bloated, bureaucratic Port Authority to run Newark Airport. Instead of being a stepchild to New York City, New Jersey should’ve built an airport of its own long ago when there were still some undeveloped areas with easy access to the state’s highway network.
Oh well, too late for that.
> Now retired in Tucson, Mr. Cantoni can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.