On paper, Newark International Airport has a lot going for it. It is relatively close to New York City (often closer than JFK, even from Manhattan) and has enough New Jersey folks around to also help boost its capacity. It's a United hub with flights all over. However, the airport has a well-deserved terrible reputation. Some of that was bad infrastructure in the terminals, but the newer Terminal A helps with this. There's one currently unfixable issue though. The runways. The runways are horrendous and trapped in an essentially unfixable problem of not being able to grow.
The geometry problem
Newark has 3 runways. That's generally pretty good for a medium to large airport, but there's a very big catch. One of the runways intersects the other two right at the beginning which makes it impossible to use it in parallel.
The regular runways
- 4L/22R and 4R/22L are 11,000 ft and 10,000 ft. Centerlines are 949 feet apart (computed from surveyed endpoints).
- FAA minimum for dependent parallel approaches — two staggered arrival streams — is 2,500 ft. Fully independent wants 4,300 ft.
- So Newark gets one arrival runway and one departure runway. You can land 22L and depart 22R at once; you cannot land two at once.
The one workaround, and the FAA just closed it
- SFO's 28L/28R are 750 ft apart — tighter than Newark — and ran side-by-side visual approaches for decades, pilots holding their own separation. That is how it hit ~54 arrivals/hr.
- April 2026: the FAA prohibited them even in clear weather. Arrivals must be staggered.
- With the 1R/19L repaving, SFO's arrival rate fell about a third, to roughly 36/hr.
- 36/hr is Newark's bad-weather number.
The third runway is a trap
- 11/29 is 6,725 ft and crosses both main runways, near the 22 ends — where aircraft touch down and start their takeoff rolls.
- A Runway 29 departure crosses 4R/22L about 730 ft into its takeoff roll and 4L/22R at about 1,745 ft — on both main runways for the first ~20 seconds, below rotation speed.
- So every Runway 29 departure is bought with a hole in the arrival stream.
The simulation
The airport underneath is fixed: 72 flights an hour — the FAA's current cap — in good weather, with runway 29 available if the departures need it.
Four things about the simulation
The cap is roughly Newark's bad-weather rate. FAA cap since 2025 is 72 operations an hour — 36 arrivals, 36 departures. Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which owns Newark's approach airspace, is staffed at around half. 36 arrivals/hr is almost exactly the ILS rate.
A storm eats the margin and nothing else. Add storm — 90 minutes of low ceiling. Arrival rate falls from ~39 to ~34/hr, 3–4 aircraft holding, and it clears within ~30 minutes of the ceiling lifting. The cap is doing its job. An all-day overcast is a different animal.
Eight minutes of closed runway is not eight minutes of delay. Disabled aircraft on 22L. Aircraft on final go around and rejoin the queue — watch them leave the approach and reappear in the holding count. The runway reopens on time; the airport needs ~30 minutes to get level again.
Runway 29 is a relief valve, not capacity. Departure bank — twelve aircraft at once. 29 starts firing, departures spike to the mid-40s/hr. Green squares mark where the departure is sitting on 22L and 22R; the 22L one is on the touchdown zone. Empties the queue faster, does not move more airplanes.
What if Newark just did what SFO did?
Both parallels landing, paired side by side. Wake rules still bar widebodies and 757s from pairing. Runway 29 off and demand pushed past what either configuration can absorb, so the runways are the limit.
- Arrivals ~47/hr → ~70. Departures ~47 → mid-twenties.
- Total movements: ~93 before, ~94 after.
- 22R is already doing a job. The slot rate never changed; pairing just puts a second arrival in the slot 22R would have used to launch something. Two movements per slot either way.
- Same shape as the runway 29 trade.
- SFO could do both because it has four runways: two parallels for arrivals, a separate crossing pair for departures. Newark has two usable runways and a third that conflicts with both.