In a move that may, at least at first, cause as much confusion as it hopes to cure, officials at New York City’s JFK International Airport are planning to renumber the airport’s gates to avoid having the same gate number in more than one terminal.
Just to add to that, the airport’s terminals are numbered 1, 4, 5, 7 and 8; the missing numbers are former terminals, now disappeared. A new Terminal 1 (whose operators insist on calling One) and a new Terminal 6 are under construction.
While Terminal 4 gates are prefixed with A or B, the other terminals all start with 1 and count on up to as many as they have, 47 in the case of Terminal 8. Since distances among the terminals are not walkable and there is no after-security connection, a gate error could be significant.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport hasn’t said yet what their new scheme will be, or exactly when it will be implemented, but the leading option appears to be a three-digit numbering system, with the first digit indicating the terminal, so that Gate 9 in Terminal 4 would be Gate 409, while Terminal 8 would have Gate 809.
