You think you know Teterboro Airport? You don’t know Teterboro Airport, and you should read James M. O’Neill’s feature at NorthJersey.com to learn just how much you don’t know. I live about 20 minutes away from Teterboro, frequently observe private jets in- and outbound from its runways flying over my house, and actually took a memorable round-trip flight from the airport once. O’Neill’s magnum opus massively schooled me.
Here he is on the then-and-now aspect of this once-obscure but now famous travel hub:
Teterboro Airport started as a small airstrip in Bergen County’s rural marshland in 1919…. In the 1920s, when a plane needed to land on the unlit runway at night, it relied on the headlights of cars parked alongside. But Teterboro…has transformed in recent decades into one of the busiest non-commercial airports in the U.S., with a combined 177,000 takeoffs and landings in 2024, an average of 488 a day.
The considerable uptick is thanks to private jet travel becoming, if not exactly common, then more accessible. O’Neill concentrates on Flexjet, but he also details others, such a NetJets, which has plans for a Teterboro expansion in 2026.
From airstrip to important general aviation airport
Teterboro is so busy that O’Neill cites an executive who operates a private-jet service out of the facility saying that the place could use another runway. That’s unlikely, so he expects other smaller regional airports to start picking up Teterboro’s overflow. (Teterboro itself is actually considered a “reliever” airport, taking stress off the crowded airspace of the New York/New Jersey area.) Flying private certainly isn’t cheap, but it now runs about $6,000-$10,000 an hour, putting it well within reach of various affluent customers who might value a quick, hassle-free jaunt from Teterboro to Washington Dulles, the “top destination,” according to O’Neill.
The nuts-and-bolts of how Teterboro achieved its current status is interesting, but what’s more fascinating about this piece is how extra info and fun history is crammed in. The flight that involved a pet pony, for example, and the extra protection that was required to, shall we say, pony-proof the jet’s cabin (a tarp was involved). Or that time in 2002 when “Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones flew to Teterboro to discuss the head coaching job with Bill Parcells, the Bergen County native and legendary NFL coach who had won two Super Bowls with the New York Giants,” as O’Neill recounts. The men met in Jones’s plane to seal the deal.
And there’s still more!
We also learn how much Teterboro takes in annually (over $64 million in 2023), what it costs to land there (it maxes out at $815), who some of its unsavory regulars have been (Jeffrey Epstein was a frequent flier), what the airport does to mitigate noise, and who it was named for (Walter C. Teter). Back in the day, Teterboro was home to the Gates Flying Circus, a barnstorming act from the 1920s, and both Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart had connections to the airfield.
Pan Am was active at Teterboro in the 1970s, and these days Blade operates from the airport. The runways are expected to become very busy next year, when the FIFA World Cup arrives at nearby MetLife Stadium. It’s safe to say that I now know almost everything about Teterboro, and certainly wouldn’t mind taking another flight out of the airport. I did that many years ago, and it was memorable: a small jet that shot straight into the sky, then a visit to a factory in Kentucky, and finally a swift return to the Garden State. Easiest flight of my entire life. I fully understand why Teterboro is doing so well.
