A new perspective on an 85-year-old airport

Some 60M passengers travel through JFK each year, over half of whom are international travellers. “This is welcome to America, but the experience could be so much better,” says Chris Chalk, our global aviation sector lead.

The customer experience across its six terminals has not kept pace with global standards. Industry consulting firm Skytrax ranked the airport number 59 in its 2016 listing of the world’s top 100 airports. More worryingly, JFK was already nearing capacity in 2016, with passenger numbers forecast to rise to 75M by 2030 and 100M by 2050.

Creating a world-class airport for the future (Credit: Grimshaw)

JFK is sandwiched between Jamaica Bay and south Queens, making it impossible to simply build again. The Port Authority needed another way to meet future demand and achieve its goal of seeing JFK make it into Skytrax’s top 10, something no other US airport has achieved.

Early on we worked with the Port Authority to redefine world class from the bottom up, drawn from our team’s global experience. From doing the little things extremely well to identifying the best measures of performance, we focused on six main themes (see diagram), and these set the tone for changes across the board.

Through our masterplan, we have reframed the challenge. While we have considered discrete buildings, roads and runways, we have thrown the spotlight on one overarching objective: helping all users move more confidently and quickly through every stage of their journey. Focusing on making JFK the conduit for great customer experience will also result in a more efficient and adaptable airport.

Our role has grown considerably from our original master planning appointment. We now touch virtually every aspect of the project:

• Preparing the overall National Environmental Policy Act compliance assessment and designing associated climate resilience strategies
• Carrying out commercial and technical advisory support for procurement, leases and governance (including for the giant new terminal 1 or T1)
• Managing design for the approach roads and terminal frontage areas, a new ground transportation centre and a new consolidated support facility for cargo operations

Six themes that guide our JFK masterplan

Simplifying approach routes

The six terminals at JFK are arranged in an oval. They are numbered one to eight in anticlockwise fashion, starting with T1 at the eight o’clock position and running through to T8 at the 10 o’clock position – although T3 was demolished in 2011, T6 in 2013 and T2 will be demolished to make way for the south side terminal development portion of the programme. Most of the terminals are already on their second or third iteration for their lease areas.

Three-quarters of JFK users travel by motor vehicle and are fed directly into the centre of the complex, where terminal development had led to a tangled thicket of approach roads that causes congestion and confuses drivers.

To enable users to reach their destination more quickly and directly, we reconfigured the entire network of roads. “We moved the decision point away from the central terminal area, out to the main highways,” explains Richard Easteal, our principal project manager and lead on landside transportation for the master planning.

We borrowed lessons from our work at London Heathrow Airport to plan direct routes to specific terminals beginning at the highway itself, while enabling drivers to navigate to different points once inside the terminal complex.

“Simpler routes prevent overloading drivers with information, so they can get it right first time,” says Richard. “That’s 75% fewer decision points, and less than half the number of junctions in the central terminal area while increasing capacity by 50%.” Fewer drivers will be lost or baffled, while traffic circulation and efficiency will improve throughout the site. Reprofiling the road network is ongoing, although most of this work will be completed in 2026, along with the new T1 and T6.

By simplifying the approach roads, we were able to reclaim 12ha of land in the centre of the site. Here, we’ve planned a ground transportation centre – a multipurpose, multistorey structure that will house car parking and vehicle waiting areas, facilitate pedestrian routes between terminals, and connect to the airport’s rail link, AirTrain.

Working with our architectural partner Grimshaw, we have set aside the top level to feature recreational areas such as a park, while the exterior walls feature green facades facing the terminals and engineering timber cladding facing the highway approaches. A design-build contractor will be appointed in 2023, with the facility due to open in 2027.

Improving connections to JFK’s rail link

Futureproofing terminal access

The first stage of a user journey is accessing terminals from the service roads. A fundamental rethink was needed to improve customer experience and airport efficiency.

The current design, common to airports across the US, causes traffic congestion. Added to inadequate drop-off parking, the design prompts the occupants of vehicles to disembark in live traffic lanes, then compete with other vehicles to reach the kerb. As Chris puts it: “The existing road layout preconditioned people to having a bad experience before they had even entered the terminal.”

Our solution is to ensure that everyone gets access to a kerb and to split each approach road into two parallel tracks when it reaches a terminal. Each track offers space on both sides for drivers to pull in – a drop-off lane or angled parking bays, depending on the location – and kerbs on both sides. This more than doubles the available kerb space, ensuring passengers don’t unload bags in live traffic lanes.

“Rethinking the service roads in this way has also meant that we can move the kerbs further from the terminal building,” says Chris. “This makes the whole area feel light and airy, which is better for user experience, but has the added benefit of meeting updated TSA security requirements of a 30m offset common to international standards.”  

We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure these areas don’t feel like car parks, adding plenty of trees, installing attractive benches and planters, and designing weather-protection canopies and wind barriers that maximise natural light.

Flexible routes

Our new layout for terminal frontages enables the Port Authority to separate different vehicular modes into discrete areas. For example, the first segment of one track could be dedicated to private cars on one side and for-hire vehicles on the other. The parallel track segments could be reserved for buses and taxis.

“We spent a lot of time looking at the future of roads,” says principal project manager Smit Bavishi. By introducing digital signage along the frontage areas, monitored by a site-wide suite of technologies, such as cameras and sensors, the Port Authority can change any area at any time, and allocate it to another mode.

We’ve also proposed integrating digital wayfinding with passenger mobile devices. This would allow scenarios such as displaying the name of the passenger who has just booked a private-hire vehicle on the overhead sign at a parking space. The driver could then proceed directly to a reserved parking space, cutting congestion, and enabling them to navigate directly to the correct vehicle, cutting waiting times at the kerb. This would improve user experience for both the driver and the passenger.

Frontage flexibility and digital technologies will improve user experience today, while building-in adaptability so that JFK can meet changing mobility patterns over the next three decades.

Lack of kerbside drop-off space causes congestion

Planned new kerbside for arrivals (Credit: Grimshaw)

Enhancing wayfinding

At this stage of the journey, a user has now arrived at their JFK terminal more smoothly and calmly than ever before. But what about finding the correct terminal entrance, the right check-in kiosk, and beyond? “Delivering great service doesn’t mean just doing it in one area,” notes Kristallia Tiligadis, principal in aviation governance and customer experience at Mott MacDonald. “You have to look at the end-to-end customer journey and understand and address the needs of all user types.”

To understand exactly what a user experiences, we partnered with Dr Megan Ryerson, associate dean for research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, to conduct pioneering research. Dr Ryerson had developed a method that employs eye-tracking technology to evaluate cognitive workload for cyclists and pedestrians and how they process information.

The device looks like a pair of spectacles, featuring forward-facing cameras and cameras pointing at the user’s eyes. Participants in our study wore the apparatus and then travelled to, around and through the airport to simulate real-world journeys. By tracking and measuring the wearer’s pupils, then cross-referencing that with what the user was looking at, we could determine how much stress they were under and the cause. Timing how long the wearer looked at specific areas of signage also helped us to understand where information could be better positioned to improve recognition and reduce anxiety.

We also worked with Dr. Ryerson to shadow journeys for users with visual and mobility impairments, non-native English speakers, elderly travellers, infrequent flyers, and other user groups. “For the first time, this has given us scientific, evidence-based insight into what a user sees and feels on their journey to and through the airport,” says Chris.

Our research shaped the comprehensive new wayfinding and branding manual with our specialist consultant Mijksenaar, in collaboration with the Port Authority customer experience team. The manual is being rolled out across all five of the Port Authority’s airports, and all leaseholders must comply with it.

Finding your way

Just four primary wayfinding colours will be used across the entire user journey, from the website and information on handheld devices to signs and printed materials. Yellow is for flights and operations, purple is for connecting flights, green is for airport exits and ground transportation, and blue is for services and amenities.

We have removed as much text as possible from wayfinding signage, prioritising directional arrows and iconography and placing these over one of the four wayfinding colours. This has turned signs into a trail of wayfinding ‘beacons’ that help users move confidently in the right direction, even if they cannot read the text.

Overhead wayfinding signage will be located 2.4m above the ground, where it falls into the natural eyeline of most people, and we’ve mandated that advertising and other messaging is kept out of this area. Discovering that identifying gates is one of the biggest points of stress for passengers, we have stipulated a larger font size for gate numbers and placed them at the top of any signs that display multiple lines of information.

We concentrated, too, on ‘natural wayfinding’ – that is, using lighting and architectural design cues to make passenger journeys through the airport more intuitive. For example, in outdoor spaces, we’ve specified one specific paver type for all primary pedestrian routes. Secondary routes will use another, and seating and relaxation areas a third. Even without signage, this will help people understand which routes are for going places and which are for taking a break.

“This was a great example of collaboration between our team and the Port Authority in developing the next generation of wayfinding. This approach has already been used in the new Terminal A at Newark Liberty Airport, which opened its doors in January 2023,” says Chris.

Delivering the best customer experience

When it came to designing the user experience at the terminal buildings, we instituted a series of research projects into brands that do customer experience better than anyone else, including Disney, Apple and Ritz Carlton. “These are companies that excel at customer service for global audiences, and which turn visitors into loyal, repeat customers,” says Kristallia.

Chris agrees: “They know how to deliver an emotional experience – and that is what flying is, more than almost any other sort of travel.”

Our studies yielded some unexpected lessons, albeit directly relevant to airport development. “Disney’s ‘keys’ are safety, show, courtesy, efficiency, and inclusion – with safety at the top,” says Chris. “This surprised us, until you think that rides must be safe before you can even begin to think about other things like queuing times, or how staff interact with guests.”

Kristallia elaborates: “Accessibility and inclusivity go far beyond design and construction standards. It’s not just about designing your doorways to be a certain width, for example. It includes how you design wayfinding, the ambience of the facility, the staff culture, and how they address people.”

This research influenced our development of the new JFK customer experience performance manual. It focuses on outcomes rather than processes, which allows the third-party owners of JFK’s terminal buildings to develop their own methods to meet our qualitative standards, while ensuring a consistently high user experience across the whole airport.

“If we can get the ‘brilliant basics’ right first, other elements can be upgraded to surprise and delight customers over time,” says Chris. Kristallia agrees: “Great customer service isn’t about how new your facility is. What counts is what you’re able to do with it.”

Spreading the knowledge

In a first for a major airport, our client has made the manual publicly available, and this change in culture is already promoting progress. In 2019, JFK was awarded level-two accreditation in customer experience by Airports Council International. It was the first airport in North America to reach this standard, which is based on careful analysis of factors such as journey mapping, service design, culture, and stakeholder collaboration, and the new JFK terminals are each required to reach level three when they become operational under the terms of their leases.

Investors, developers, and airlines have bought into the approach, committing $15bn to terminal development.

Vision for T1 (Credit: Grimshaw)

Vision for T1 (Credit: Grimshaw)

Vision for T1 (Credit: Grimshaw)

Benchmarks for pandemic protocols

When COVID-19 arrived in 2020, this proved a clear and obvious threat to airport operations as well as to customer experience. We immediately undertook a three-month sprint to adapt the project to the ‘new normal’. We turned to our in-house international health security unit to help design new protocols, setting up an internal taskforce to share the lessons into what we termed ‘infrastructure epidemiology’.

“Many of the protocols we developed for JFK went on to be used by other mass transit providers throughout the pandemic,” says Chris. We looked at a broad range of measures, including protecting users by staggering check-in times, making queuing systems linear to reduce customer proximity, identifying a priority order for cleaning contact surfaces, and enabling working-from-home for staff wherever possible. We wove all the outputs into JFK’s new customer experience manual.

“Pandemic protocols will accelerate the transition to totally touchless journeys,” says Chris. Touchless technologies, such as facial recognition used at check-in kiosks, may be able to process visas and other biometric information in the future, reducing waiting time and improving customer experience and terminal efficiency.

Our work on COVID-19 protocols has gone on to inform a new section on healthy buildings and pandemic resilience in the most recent edition of the IATA airport development reference manual, a critical resource used in airport planning globally. “Airports around the world will now be following in the footsteps of JFK,” says Chris.

COVID-19 protocols for mass transit providers

Reducing delays

The final piece of the puzzle in improving customer experience and airport capacity at JFK lies on the other side of the terminals: airside.

Flight delays cause severe anxiety for most passengers, and JFK clearly had work to do here. A 2015 finding by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said: “JFK still ranks as one of most delayed airports in the country, with ground delays far exceeding the national average.”

We identified a key bottleneck in the aircraft gates where airplanes are parked, and the core processing capacity for passenger aircraft. However, Chris notes: “Efficiency is not really about having more gates – it’s about having better gates, making sure you can match the right-sized gates to the incoming aircraft.”

Frequent changes to airlines, fleet and destinations since the beginning of golden age of aviation have littered the terminals with a hotchpotch of gate configurations. We brought plans for better future adaptations to the table, enabling flexibility in use for the 60+ airlines using JFK for the long term.

Improving cargo operations

Another element we examined was JFK’s busy cargo operations. Support facilities are spread across four different areas, which is not conducive to efficiency. By using geospatial modelling, and lessons we’d learned while working at Hong Kong’s international airport, we concluded that all cargo operations should be consolidated into one area. This would increase the cargo capacity by a factor of three and free up land for other uses.

Work is underway to create a shared ramp area, staff parking, and truck staging, along with a new 32,500m² building that is due to be completed in 2024. The new cargo facility will make extensive use of cutting-edge technology to improve efficiency, such as using automated racking to fully exploit vertical space. “We found that solutions such as these, in tandem with adjusted KPIs, could increase throughput of the area by 50%,” says Chris.

Making this part of the site more efficient will benefit the entire site, including the airlines that use the same runways, resulting in better experiences for passengers.

JFK is one of the most delayed airports in the US

Driving up standards

For our masterplan to succeed in achieving the Port Authority’s vision of delivering world-class user experience, all stakeholders need to adhere to a clear set of common standards. To do so, we drew up new frameworks for user experience, environmental sustainability, and social impact. These now form the backbone of all new leases, including for the new T1 and T6.

The outcomes are articulated in the form of compliance with our new customer experience performance and wayfinding manuals, as well as in a new series of key performance indicators (KPIs). “We have introduced a set of incentives and penalties into the new leases,” explains Smit, who has been seconded to the Port Authority in technical advisory capacity to project manage the new leases and commercial agreements. “Our client had some existing KPIs, but we’ve doubled those.”

About 100 items are now encoded into each lease. Many are qualitative, while the quantitative items will push stakeholders to take big steps forward in reporting. “To measure compliance with KPIs on customer waiting times at check-in or baggage reclaim, for example, we expect many terminal operators will begin using technologies such as heat sensors or cameras,” says Smit. “This will open up a whole new world of data to target improvements in user experience and efficiency, as well as accelerating the transition to digital technologies for customers too.”

For the first time at JFK, leaseholders will also be required to report every year on environmental sustainability. “Our client has a very strong focus on sustainability but wasn’t sure how to achieve best-in-class performance,” says Smit. We picked up the baton, writing significant environmental performance requirements into the leases. These include a 20% reduction in energy use and 90% diversion of waste from landfill. (The highest-performing terminal at JFK today has a 65% diversion rate.)

30% of all work must be awarded to businesses owned by women and minorities

40% of the workforce must use public transport to access the site

100% of buses bringing in workers must be zero-emissions

Reducing carbon

We’ve also instigated a project to phase out all fossil-fuelled baggage tugs, belt loaders, and aircraft positioning tractors by 2027, transitioning to all-electric airport ground support equipment.

“Based on past experience, benchmarking against airports in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Manchester, and Toronto, we knew this was ambitious but achievable,” says Smit.

“We needed to find ways to minimise or mitigate the environmental impacts from constructing the JFK redevelopment programme,” agrees Elizabeth Thompson, senior project planner at our New York City office, who has been working alongside Smit to ensure our masterplan properly facilitates the Port Authority’s impressive environmental considerations. “During construction, for instance, heavy equipment diesel engines must meet the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s more stringent emission standards, 40% of the workforce must use public transport to access the site, and 100% of buses bringing in workers must be zero-emissions. The Port Authority’s new governance framework is ensuring that all partners and developers adhere to these requirements.”

In another US first, the Port Authority stipulated that 30% of all work must be awarded to businesses owned by women and minorities. However, many of these companies are small businesses and were daunted by the perceived financial risk to their cash flow, given the size of the project.

We diagnosed the issue. and on the parts of the project where we engaged partner companies directly, we t treated them as an extension of our own team. This meant we could make payments ourselves, removing the anxiety from these partners and helping them reach new professional heights.

This move was widely recognised when, in 2022, we were presented with the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award from the Northeast Chapter of the American Association of Airport Executives. We remain determined to find new ways to support the local community and the planet, understanding that, in the words of Elizabeth, “transportation development impacts everybody”.

Unlocking options

Our master planning for JFK unlocks options that could allow the airport to handle 90M passengers a year within the same airfield layout. and potentially 120M passengers – almost doubling current demand. That’s a 20% increase in capacity over our client’s original brief.

Our work has already delivered big wins in customer experience certification, environmental sustainability awards, and meaningful social impact. At the same time, our radical approach of viewing the airport as a centre of great customer service rather than a traditional airport has won the support of the private sector, resulting in $15bn of investment topping up our client’s $2.9bn budget. This makes the entire programme possible.

“Mott MacDonald has been instrumental in assisting us in guiding $18bn of transformational airport infrastructure. They have led the development of our new customer experience and governance structures,” said James Steven, program director at the Port Authority’s JFK redevelopment team. “They have helped us to get ACI customer experience accreditation, the highest in the US, embedding UN Sustainable Development Goals into our long-term planning and leading the technology transformation across the airports.”

“JFK is an innovation incubator,” concludes Chris. “We’re developing forward-thinking concepts and approaches here that future project teams will turn to for reference, both inside and outside the aviation sector.”

While much of the development is under construction, there’s no doubt that JFK is already on its way to becoming a worthy, world-class gateway to the Unites States, and setting new standards in safety, efficiency, and user experience.

Terminal milestones

Construction at JFK’s new T1 began in September 2022. It’s a $9.5bn project that will replace the existing, ageing T1 and T2. The 223,000m² building will feature 23 aircraft gates and will open in two stages, reaching full capacity in 2030. 

Financial close was reached in November 2022 on a $4.2bn project for a new T6 to replace its already-demolished predecessor as well as the existing T7. Construction will begin in 2023, and it will be completed in 2028 in another two-phase approach. Elsewhere, T4 is undergoing a $1.5bn expansion that enabled Delta to vacate T2 in January 2023 to free up space for the construction of new T1. At T8, a $400M expansion was completed in December 2022, enabling British Airways to move from its 50-year-old base at T7 and free up space for the development of the new T6.

Replacing ageing terminals with world-class facilities (Credit: Grimshaw)

Passenger experience was the guiding consideration for the redesigned airport

Using tunnelling expertise to progress new aboveground structures

One thorny challenge for the ground transportation centre at JFK was the revised routing of three terminal service roads. Rationalisation work had led to these roads running right through the ground transportation centre itself, on the same level. “This creates enclosed roads, cloaked by a building,” explains Leon Higgins, our North America project principal and design manager for the ground transportation centre. “The problem is that an off-the-shelf fire and life safety engineering solution for this arrangement doesn’t exist.”

We solved this by turning it into a tunnelling problem. “We realised that if we enclosed the roads themselves, effectively separating them from the building, we could treat the road sections as tunnels, and the rest of the building as a building,” says Leon. “There are specific building codes that apply to both, so this allows the contractors to design to established regulations. We turned an unknown into a conventional design-build specification.”

We were also able to supply all the relevant fire safety planning data for the specification thanks to our in-house experts, who undertook similar work on the East Side Access rail tunnel project. This project is part of the country’s largest commuter rail network with 11km of tunnels beneath the boroughs of Queens and Manhattan in New York City.

From the Olympics to New York City’s transit system: Fielding the right team

After interviewing our team as part of the competitive bidding process, the client was convinced we had the right team for the job.

“Within a week of our interview with the Port Authority, we started work,” recalls Leon. “Winning a bid is always a vote of confidence, and even more so given this remarkable turn of speed.”

The team is led by Chris, who has spent more than 40 years at Mott MacDonald, where he launched the firm’s aviation planning practice three decades ago. In that period, Chris has worked on airports of all sizes and scales across the globe. He has direct experience of what it takes to create airports that are ranked among the best in the world, including London Heathrow, Hong Kong, Singapore Changi, and many others. 

This pedigree also serves him well as one of the co-authors of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) Airport Development Reference Manual, which has been recognised for more than 50 years as the industry’s most important guide for airport planning and development.

“Not every company has a Chris Chalk,” laughs principal planner Luisa Gonzalez-Suarez, design manager for the new T6. 

Luisa is Spanish, a chartered engineer and project manager who gained international airport design experience on many projects around the world before settling in New York.

She goes on: “There is always someone to turn to within Mott MacDonald to answer the most difficult technical questions – and we love airports and aviation!” Luisa’s enthusiasm has been rewarded in her recent promotion to technical director, in recognition of her abilities to manage design and people.

Kristallia is based in London but is originally from Greece. A specialist in statistical analysis and research, she has explored and modelled many critical aspects of airport operations, including passenger flows and behaviour. Her projects have included work at London Heathrow and London Gatwick as well as airports across Europe, Africa, the Philippines, and Turkey. This has given her unique perspectives on the challenges at JFK.

With a New Zealand accent giving away a clue to his origins, Leon has worked extensively in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US. His portfolio includes Wembley Stadium, the London and Rio Olympics, the Pan-American Games, and Saskatchewan Stadium. These lessons are proving invaluable in his role as design manager for the JFK ground transportation centre.  

Smit has spent most of his career with us, apart from two years working for the Toronto Transit Commission. He’s worked across Europe and the Middle East, and his airports portfolio includes Los Angeles, Toronto, Singapore, and Gatwick. 

A native New Yorker, Elizabeth has spent 15 years working as a transportation planner in New Jersey and New York. She got her start working for a metropolitan planning organisation in northern New Jersey, focused on regional transportation in the New York City metropolitan region. Later, she supported the development of New York City Transit’s Select Bus Service and environmental assessments of JFK and Newark Liberty International Airport, before joining Mott MacDonald in 2019.

“Our local team can plug into the company’s global expertise,” says Elizabeth. “Our client has certainly appreciated this mix of local and international talent – it’s an impressive combination.”

Elizabeth Thompson, senior project manager, Mott MacDonald, reflects on the JFK transformation project