The Worst Airport in America

Airports—not sure if you’ve heard—are a mess. This is especially true this week, as a cascade of disasters (both preventable and not) have caused delays, outages, and long lines across the country. But the airport was a mess long before this week, and it will be long after. When I was first assigned to find the worst one in America, I felt for a minute like I’d been asked which Oreo flavor is the best, or which of my teeth is the toothiest: There are so many, and they all are.

But certain airports are more hated than others. Reagan, near D.C., because it has the most delays of any major airport; one in three of its flights was late in 2025, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Dallas, because it is the biggest—flight-missingly, leg-destroyingly big, bigger than the island of Manhattan, with an incredible 1.5-mile distance between security and the farthest gate. Meanwhile, Hartsfield-Jackson, in Atlanta, is the world’s busiest: On any given good day, more people than live in the entire country of Barbados trudge through it; this week, they were doing so very, very slowly, as security wait times crept up past two hours.

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The major hubs are bad in all the predictable ways, but America’s smaller airports are each cursed and tragic in their own exquisite style. When someone posed the “worst airport” question on Reddit last year, the most upvoted response was about the one in Charlotte, North Carolina, which was built as a manageably sized regional airport but is now one of the busiest in the world, thanks to demographic and flight-pattern changes. Orlando has the most complaints about lost or mishandled luggage, according to an analysis of TSA data. And an evaluation of Department of Transportation data shows that Lincoln, Nebraska, and Toledo, Ohio, are tied for the longest delays among lower-volume airports. Apparently they have so few flights that any short delay can quickly turn into a long one.

An airport’s ability to fulfill its most basic function—serving as a place where a human being can, ostensibly, get on an airplane—is just one of the factors that might play into whether it’s terrible. Dallas is America’s worst airport, a travel reporter for a major newspaper told me in an email, because despite its gargantuan size, “you cannot find a good meal there to save your life.” (Your best bet, she went on to say, is “Pinkberry in Terminal C, a dark, low-ceilinged abyss with too-few bathrooms.” Bleak!) Hundreds of airports in this otherwise great nation do not have even one single solitary Chili’s Too. At least one has no restaurant at all. Also, someone on Reddit once paid $27 for two protein bars and a cup of grapes at JFK.

All airports are depressing and scary; some go above and beyond. For example, at least seven American airports are named after people who died in plane crashes. Air-travel-related animal death and injury is exceedingly rare, but the government does collect and publish data on it, so I might have bad news for dogs traveling through Seattle. I was unable to confirm that the Denver airport is home to the headquarters of the Illuminati, as many people believe, but I can tell you that it is home to a 32-foot-tall horse that has glowing, Mephistophelian red eyes and that, in a tragic accident, killed its creator when a chunk of it fell off during the sculpting process. (Locals call it Blucifier.) A couple of hundred miles away, Aspen/Pitkin County Airport sits in a narrow valley more than a mile above sea level, in a part of the country known for its sudden snowstorms, amid terrain that limits the use of instrument flying, and, for some reason, they made the runway unusually short. It is so dangerous that you need a special pilot’s license to land there. As it turns out, there’s a good reason to hate—or at least distrust—just about every airport.

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Well, again—some more than others. Ultimately, all of this airport research took me to a dark place: Newark, New Jersey, whose airport has been found, variously, to offer the most stress, the worst food, the most travel disruptions, and the second-most delays (behind Reagan). On Yelp, where it has a lower rating than several nearby prisons, 1,100 one-star reviews refer to it with vocabulary such as chaotic, unacceptable, and hell on earth. The more than 30,000 people who took the data-analytics firm JD Power’s annual airport-satisfaction survey last year believe Newark to be the worst airport in North America, as does Charity Moore, an influencer who has been a flight attendant for 11 years.

Last June, my family and I wasted nine miserable hours there as our flight was boarded and then delayed and then deboarded and then canceled. The air rang with random alarms; the soft surfaces were mottled with mystery stains. At one point, I paid for, and then spent 45 minutes waiting on, pad thai at a restaurant that was not, in fact, open. To this day, I am unsure whether there is a working power outlet in the entire place. We ended up deciding to drive to our final destination, in rural Ontario, and as we sped off in our rental car—tired, hungry, hundreds of dollars poorer, staring down the barrel of a 500-mile drive with a screaming toddler—I felt something approaching euphoria, because at least I was finally leaving Newark airport.

This observation is a little embarrassing, only because it’s so obvious—hating Newark airport is like hating Mondays, or splinters, or wet socks, or the inevitability of death’s cold, cruel tap on the shoulder. Or air travel in general. The truth is, all airports are bad. You’ve heard. They are unlovely and unloved, designed to be passed through, and doomed by decades of disinvestment. They are a vortex of everything annoying: confined spaces, limited options, bad Wi-Fi, overpriced food, fluorescent lighting, other people. They are the opposite of vacation, even as they are inextricably linked to it. And they lay bare the fragility of this modern life, how easy it is for everything to go wrong—right now, especially. The worst airport isn’t Atlanta, or Dallas, or Newark. The worst airport is whatever airport you are in.

I’m joking, of course. The worst airport is Newark.