After World War I the Dutch engineer who built the German fighter planes the Red Baron flew moved to a stretch of New Jersey marshland twelve miles from Manhattan and started building airliners. Lindbergh and Earhart spent time on the same field. Today it is the most-flown private jet airport in the United States.
A Pirep featured story · KTEB Teterboro, Teterboro, NJ
In 1917 a New York investment banker named Walter C. Teter bought roughly 700 acres of marshland in Bergen County, New Jersey — flat, wet, undeveloped, twelve miles from Midtown Manhattan across the Hudson. The land had no obvious commercial use. During World War I, North American Aviation built an aircraft components plant on it. The first flight from the site was made in 1919. The marshland became Teterboro.
After the war, the airfield got an unexpected tenant. Anthony Fokker — the Dutch engineer who had designed and built nearly every German fighter plane of the First World War, including the Fokker Dr.I triplane that Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, flew to 80 air victories — had been allowed to leave Germany with his designs and equipment in 1919. He moved his operation to Teterboro in the early 1920s. There he built the Fokker F.VII trimotor airliners that became one of the workhorses of early commercial aviation, and the four-engine F.32 — the first four-engine passenger airliner built in America. Through the Golden Age of Aviation in the 1920s and 1930s, Charles Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, and Amelia Earhart all spent time on the same Bergen County field.
The Army took over during World War II. In 1949 the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey bought the airport from a private owner named Fred Wehran for civilian use. In 1973 Teterboro voluntarily applied for and became the first general aviation airport in the United States to be certified under FAA Part 139 — the same safety standard required of commercial air carrier airports. The Port Authority assumed full operational responsibility in December 2000.
Today Teterboro has a hard 100,000-pound weight limit, which makes airline operations impossible and protects the field from ever becoming a commercial airport. Instead it has become something else: in 2023, KTEB recorded 74,577 private aviation departures, the most of any airport in the country. It is the airport that A-list celebrities, financial executives, and heads of state use to enter Manhattan without being seen. Twelve minutes by helicopter to the East 34th Street Heliport from the same marshland Walter Teter bought when he could not think of anything else to do with it.