Newark serves as one of the New York area's 3 major airport and is often the most convenient airport for many NJ residents. Serving as a United (and previously a Continental) hub, the airport contains a lot of both domestic and international connecting traffic in addition to the O&D traffic from the surrounding area. Over the past 31 years, Newark's total passengers served has grown by 116% hitting an all time high of 49.2M in 2024. However, most of that growth happened in the last decade (even with a big COVID dip in the middle). As recently as 2015, the airport was only serving 35.6M passengers (see chart below).

Much of that growth from the previous 3 decades has been driven by increases in international travel. Newark historically had a strong domestic flight schedule, anchored by People's Express hub which merged into Continental in 1987. But in the early 1990's, Newark's international passengers made up only a small portion of the total passenger counts. In 1994, Newark served only 1.3M international passengers (5.5% of total passengers at the Airport). But with the opening of new international facilities at Terminal B along with the AirTrain in 1996, Newark's international schedule expanded rapidly. By 2001, 32% of Newark's passengers were international travelers with 11.1M travelers.

During the same time period and through the early 2000's, total domestic travelers only grew minimally. In 1994, there were 22.4M, 20 years later, the domestic passenger total stood at 23.9M. During that time the majority of fliers from EWR were O&D passengers, meaning they were either starting or ending their journey at Newark (as opposed to connecting at Newark). In 1994, 78.8% of the 22.4M passengers were O&D while 21.2% were connecting traffic. That ratio has stayed fair mostly flat, never going above 80% or below 75% for the next decade (see chart). Connecting traffic share did increase some in the mid 2000's, peaking at 31.7% in 2012, but has been slowly dropping and was only 18.8% (6.4M) in 2024. For comparison, out of the 34 US airports with at least 15M domestic travelers in 2024, Newark ranked 27th in domestic connecting traffic share. Of course Newark also serves as an international connector, but those connections are not included in our domestic totals.

When looking at where the airport flies to domestically, there are some changes since the early 90's. Below, I ranked the top 20 destinations from Newark in 1994 and 2024 based on departing passengers. Most of the largest airports in the country were near the top in both years, but there was a shift away from closer regional destinations towards farther away and sometime more leisure oriented spots. For example, Boston went from #3 in total passengers from EWR down to 13th and DCA, BUF, PIT, and BWI all dropped out of the top 20. Meanwhile, LAX and MCO jumped into ranks 1 and 2 in 2024 while LAS, PHX, and RSW all jumped into the top 20.

Interestingly, while there were changes in the market ranking, overall departures and available seats to the top 10 destinations in each year barely changed (48.2k departures w/8.15M seats in '94 vs 47.9k departures w/8.47M seats in '24'). The total passengers however grew by 42.7% from 5.23M to 7.46M departing passengers due to an increase in load factor from only 64% in 1994 to 88% in 2024. It's always a bit of a shock to me look at load factors from the 90's and earlier years and see just how much less crowded the average flight must have been compared to today.

So we know some of the top routes served by Newark, but we can look at the O&D numbers to see where Newark's fliers ultimately end their journeys and see some of the underlying demand for certain routes. One major caveat with O&D number for Newark is that there are two other major airports in LGA and JFK that pull from overlapping areas for demand. For today, we will only look at Newark's demand in isolation. In 1994, the largest O&D Airports for Newark mirrored the routes we see above with Atlanta, Chicago, Orlando, and LA taking the top 4 spots. ATL O&D was 1.02M (departures and arrivals combined) passengers in the top spot. While O&D for EWR-ATL grew to 1.13M in 2024, it fell to fifth highest being leap frogged by SFO and FLL. EWR-LAX takes the current top spot at 1.85M OD Passengers. Another quirk of the NYC Airports may be helping boost LAX OD traffic at Newark. Since LGA routes are distance restricted, only EWR and JFK serve LAX directly. So while LAX is at or near the top of O&D Destinations for EWR and JFK it drops down into the 30's for LGA. MCO on the other hand is served by all three airports and ranks highly among all three.

Below, I put together a table showing the top 5 O&D airport gains and losses between 1994 and 2024 by percent change (with a filter to have at least 100k of O&D in one of the years). The biggest gainers over the past 30 years appear to be towards more leisure destinations (Myrtle Beach saw the largest percent gain) that have grown in popularity recently. The two biggest drops (BWI and MDW) are airports that lost out to alternatives nearby and the loss of Southwest serving Newark entirely. In BWI's case, DC service from Newark mostly goes through IAD or DCA and similarly in Chicago service goes through ORD. BUF and ORF appear to be nearby regional locations where service was lowered. And GSO (Piedmont Triad AIrport in Greensboro, NC) is an interesting case. It's 1994 OD traffic appears to have seen a large boost due to the short lived Continental Lite hub located there which ran a lot of service to Newark between only 1993 and 1995.

So putting together the O&D for a destination along with the amount of seats that EWR flies to/from the destination, I can find the average OD to seat ratio for Newark. Plotted below is every destination to Newark with at least 25k O&D Passengers. The x-axis shows the destination's O&D Passengers and the y-axis shows how many seats were flown on a given route. I fit the red dotted line below to all destinations with at least 75k of OD Passengers in 2024. While the linear fit is not perfect and breaks down towards low end of the chart, on average for every additional O&D passenger of demand, Newark will add 1.35 seats. Therefore we can estimate the service level to a destination by comparing if EWR has seats at a higher or lower ratio than 1.35. For example, Miami has an O&D of 996k passengers and there were 1.4M available seats on routes between Newark in 2024. Therefore MIA's service level was 101%, almost right on our fit line.

Below the chart I call out in a table, the highest and lowest service levels for destinations with at least 100k O&D passengers in 2024. The highest service levels tend to come at hubs where there are likely many fliers headed on to further connections, but there are also a few smaller airport in the Northeast like ORF that rank highly (139% service level) which are likely feeding connections into Newark. The lower service levels tend to be small to mid sized airports that are farther away from Newark. It would be interesting to include a distance variable into the equation. One other interesting call outs with respect to service level: Many warm weather more tourist destinations appear on the "underserved" side of the line (for example, RSW at 85%, MSY at 84%, TPA at 89%), but these types of destinations likely focus more on only O&D traffic from NJ and NY vacationers and therefore are expected to be closer to a 1:1 O&D to Seats ratio than other destinations.

Newark's routes will continue to evolve in line with New Jerseyans' travel preferences, but it will be interesting to see just how much additional growth in terms of total passengers the airport can handle in the coming years. I don't expect New Jersey or New York to lessen it's demand for air travel. And while the airport has grown to handle 50M international and domestic passengers per year, with limited additional ability for takeoffs and landings, we will have to wait and see how the airport will accommodate any future changes.

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Note: In the 1995 NYT article linked above, it is stated that Newark had 28.0M passengers in 1994. However, I'm not sure where the article sourced the data from. It does not align with the T-100 data showing 23.7M passengers in 1994 or 26.0M passengers in 1995

Another Note: Thanks to everyone who made it to the end of my first blog on this site in over two years. I'm hoping to get back into more of a habit. So hopefully you do not have to wait as long for the next post! And as always feel free to reach out with any questions, thought, or general comments on any of the posts at matt@stlannex.com.

All data for this post was sources from T-100 and DB1B datatsets available via the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.