EWR - Connecting to International Flight
 

I am planning an international flight on Continental, ORD to EWR then on to Lisbon. Does anyone know if I may have to leave the secured area at EWR to catch my connecting flight? I'm trying to decide how much time to allot between flights. There are options ranging from 5+ hours to a little over an hour. Unfortunately, the EWR website doesn't have a terminal map, so I can't see how they are connected. The airtrain appears to be before security, so if I need to use that to get to a different terminal, I may need to go through security again. Further complicating things, on the list of airlines, it says Continental uses terminal C, except for some cities, like Chicago, where it uses terminal A. I'm also not sure yet if it might be a code share arangement, where I'll be taking TAP to Portugal, but TAP uses terminal B. Hopefully someone here has connected to an international flight at EWR.

I've done it a few times but I can't remember whether I had to go through security again. I'm guessing I didn't, because I've found the connection easy at Newark when my first flight was on time. That's the kicker though. Twice in the last few years I've had plans to fly to Newark on Continental to catch an international flight and my flight (from DCA) left so late I didn't make it in time. Both times it was due to weather in Newark that was bad enough to slow down domestic arrivals but not bad enough to slow down international departures. As a result, I'd recommend against a connection that's just a little more than an hour, unless your risk aversion is greater than your patience for sitting around an aiport.

You do not have to leave security. CO has an airside bus that takes you between A and C.

Having said that, delays are very frequent among airports in the Northeast, and it's going to get worse during the summer. Shorthaul flights going into EWR in the late afternoon are often delayed.

In general 90-minutes is what I consider "fairly comfortable". CO has almost hourly flights ORD-EWR in the afternoon, and two EWR-LIS during summer. The earlier you leave ORD the better.

I think the 3:00p-6:34p, connected to the 8:15p EWR-LIS will be your best bet, in terms of secured connection.

BTW, that bus I mentioned goes between gate 28 in A and 71 in C.

http://www.continental.com/web/en-US...maps/ewr.aspx?

Scroll down for info.

You can find a map to the newark airport here:

http://www.nwa.com/travel/trave/airports/Newark.html

Leave yourself a LOT of time, especially if this is on a Friday evening. We fly into EWR quite a bit to visit family and the flights are usually delayed at least an hour because of congestion in the NY area.

In the summer months, I try to make all my flights on the east coast happen before noon. Daily thunderstorms are common and most occur in the late afternoon.

Note that CO scheduled about 2.5 hours for its afternoon ORD-EWR flight. Typical flight time is about 1.5 hours. So, if your 3pm flight take off at 4pm (with no circling), you'll arrive EWR on-time.

If your 3pm flight take off at 5pm, you'll still get to EWR at 7:30, just enough time to make the transfer for the 8:15 flight.