On the cusp of the 70th anniversary of the originally named New York Airport’s opening in Queens, N.Y., a blue-ribbon panel in 2017 released a report to the governor of New York: The facility, once popularly known as Idlewild Airport, needed a comprehensive master plan and a total transformation. In the seven years since, builders at John F. Kennedy International Airport have been anything but idle, and the speed at which that $19-billion transformation of the roads and terminals is occurring could be called wild.
“The evolution of JFK’s terminal buildings has been a history of separate projects with private airlines or private terminal operators designing and building individual terminals … with no overall master plan to guide development. As a result, today’s Airport is fragmented,” according to the report, “A Vision Plan for John F. Kennedy International Airport.” It continued: “All future terminal expansion and redevelopment projects should be planned with a focus on interconnection with other terminals to enable JFK to grow over time into an integrated airport experience.”
