One of the more polite things anyone could say about the old Terminal B at LaGuardia Airport in New York is that it was the worst part of possibly the worst major airport in the world.
But have you been to LaGuardia lately?
It’s no longer appalling. It’s actually nice. In fact, when a panel of judges recently named the world’s best new airport building, the prestigious honor went to Terminal B. It was a bit like Arby’s winning a James Beard Award.
I wanted to know who was responsible and how they pulled it off. The most valuable people in this revitalization, as it turns out, were the ones with the roles least valued by the public.
They belonged to a tiny, elite squad of employees tasked with Terminal B’s operational readiness and transition—ORAT, for short. Not every business has the specific needs of a construction project like LaGuardia, where the bleak old terminal was demolished and replaced with a gleaming new one, but the principles of the work are universal enough that every business could use an ORAT team.
They identified risks so they could mitigate them. They reduced uncertainty. They worried about the failure of little things, which ensured the success of bigger things.
The leader of this team was a Canadian engineer named Frank Scremin. He had never been to LaGuardia.
Mr. Scremin was managing a small airport in Ontario when he was hired as the ORAT director of Terminal B. He told people where he worked only to hear strangers rant about how much they hated it.
“Our goal is to turn that around,” he said. “We want to change the narrative from ‘I hate it’ to “I love it.’”
There was a lot to hate. The dilapidated home of five airlines—American, Southwest, United, JetBlue and Air Canada, which Mr. Scremin himself flew home—Terminal B was dark and ugly with low ceilings, narrow walkways and a leaky roof. Also, birds. Of the many unspeakable things said about LaGuardia, no insult landed harder than Joe Biden calling it “third-world” during a 2014 speech on infrastructure. It would take billions of dollars and what felt like decades to fix. The rescue effort required a public-private partnership between the Port Authority and LaGuardia Gateway Partners, a consortium that included Vantage Airport Group, the management firm that developed the terminal and employs Mr. Scremin.
He’s the sort of geek who can’t help but inspect obscure corners of airports for dust and eyeball the distance between stanchions in the boarding area when he’s flying on vacation. The word he used to describe LaGuardia was not one that comes to mind for most people.
“It was interesting,” Mr. Scremin said. “It was rundown. It was not clean. It was… interesting.”
His team kept that interesting terminal running while plotting a new one and working on a tight construction site squeezed between a highway and a bay.
Their office was a spare conference room. Their desks were folding tables. Their Wi-Fi network was the airport’s Boingo hot spot.
Over the course of LaGuardia’s transformation between 2016 and 2022, there were typically five employees focused on ORAT, and they rotated 12-hour shifts to ensure 24-hour coverage during crucial periods. They were the glue that held the project together. They coordinated between the separate construction and operations teams to smooth the transition. They tested the airport in every way they could imagine to find deficiencies. When they heard cars honking, they walked outside to direct traffic. There was a problem, and they tried to solve it. That’s the ORAT way.
ORAT was born with the seamless opening of Munich’s airport in 1992, and the practice became widely adopted because of prominent logistical disruptions during other airport openings that a dedicated ORAT team might have prevented. Aviation dorks shudder to this day when they remember the meltdowns in Hong Kong in 1998 and Heathrow in 2008. They believe ORAT work is an insurance policy against chaos.
But the people in charge of this renovation had greater ambitions than saving LaGuardia. They wanted to transform the airport experience. While flying through New York will never be a form of meditation, they were determined to make Terminal B more Zen.
The whole place is deeply intuitive, strangely calm and oddly pleasant. The departures hall doesn’t feel like a dungeon. The security checkpoint has 16 lanes instead of 12. The area beyond the scanners is spacious enough for travelers to compose themselves and covered in carpetlike flooring to mute noise. The flight displays instruct passengers with time to “RELAX.” The natural light pours through windows in the morning, the skybridge over the taxiway is so bright you might need sunglasses and lamps near the gates dim at night to mimic the vibes of a hotel lounge.
Also, I know this sounds nuts, but you must visit the bathrooms. They’re beautiful. My favorite detail in Terminal B is how the stalls are just wide enough to open the door and roll in a bag without bumping into anything. “We spent an inordinate amount of time on restroom design,” said Mr. Scremin, who is now CEO of LaGuardia Gateway Partners, as most of the ORAT team members have transitioned to new jobs.
By the time a terminal finally opens, it must feel like it has been open forever, and the ORAT specialists at Terminal B agonized over the first day for years.
The work was dizzying in its complexity and demanded clever experiments from Mr. Scremin’s team.
One was a live trial in which hundreds of friends and relatives came to a concourse of Terminal B right before it opened in 2018. They were handed tickets for phantom flights and given instructions—grab a coffee before heading to Gate 29, say—as the ORAT experts observed their behavior and studied their feedback. When they realized that certain signage was too subtle and the loudspeakers sounded different in a bustling environment, they added splashes of color and tweaked the volume so that real passengers wouldn’t get lost. “We were able to stress-test the building,” said Kristi Ball, Terminal B’s former ORAT director.
They put the baggage-handling system through a similar dress rehearsal. They collected 500 pieces of luggage in all shapes and sizes, filled them with free weights and checked the bags more than 300,000 times in total. They even conducted a “crush test” and pushed the system to its limits to make sure it was ready for anything. As it happens, the ORAT team member who tormented the baggage system had a personal connection to LaGuardia: Stephanie Baccalie was born and raised in Queens.
Her colleague Evan Colpitts was busy working through the night, meanwhile, since that was the only time he could test how the jet bridges fit the planes. “It worked exactly as it did on paper 99% of the time,” he said. ORAT’s assignment was preparing for that 1%.
To remain on track, they built a checklist. ORAT people love checklists. For the transition in June 2020, their checklist was created in January 2019. In between, stuff happened. A pandemic wasn’t part of their contingency planning, but it didn’t stop the essential workers of the ORAT team. They shut down the old central terminal before midnight on a Friday, opened the doors to the new one at 4 a.m. and crossed off 113 items from their checklist that weekend.
Since it’s part of the human condition to complain about airports, some wistful New Yorkers are nostalgic for the leaks, birds and that Auntie Anne’s. But most travelers feel the same way as those who left the decrepit terminal one day and returned the next day to a spectacular facility.
That first morning, as ORAT manager Kasia Sek eavesdropped around Terminal B, she heard the highest praise for her team’s work at LaGuardia: “I think we came to the wrong airport.”
This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text