The Worst Airport in America
Traveling by plane anywhere is bad right now, but in some places, it’s worse.
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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.
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.
