What Is a Jet Bridge (and Why Airports Still Use Stairs)

For twelve years the jet bridge was my office. I worked the gates at Atlanta, mostly on T Concourse and the B gates, and I drove that thing against a few hundred different aircraft doors. I lined it up in the rain, I watched it jam at the worst possible moment, and I answered a lot of questions from passengers about why the plane at the next gate was loading by stairs while theirs got a covered walkway.

So when people ask me what a jet bridge is, I don’t reach for the dictionary. I reach for the reality. It’s a piece of heavy machinery a gate agent operates, it costs a small fortune, and airlines pay a fee every single time they use one. That last part is the whole story behind the stairs. At plenty of U.S. airports, you still walk down a set of steps and across the tarmac to your plane — and it is not because the airport forgot to build a bridge.

Here is how the whole thing actually works, what it costs, and where you’ll still be climbing.

What Is a Jet Bridge?

A jet bridge is the enclosed, movable walkway that connects an airport gate to the door of your aircraft, so you board and deplane at gate level without ever stepping outside. That’s it. It’s the covered hallway that seems to breathe a little when the plane shifts on its landing gear.

You’ll hear it called a lot of things. A jetway. An aerobridge. An air jetty. Its proper technical name is a passenger boarding bridge. They all mean the same object. “Jetway” actually began as a brand name — Delta’s first unit in 1959 was literally called the Jetway — and it stuck as a generic word the way a few product names do.

That’s the snippet-length answer. The interesting part is everything the encyclopedia entries skip: the machine underneath it, the price tag, and the reason so many flights skip it entirely.

How a Jet Bridge Actually Works

Strip away the carpet and a jet bridge is a telescoping tunnel on wheels. One end connects to the terminal at a fixed pivot called the rotunda. The other end slides in and out and rides up or down on a set of powered wheels tucked under the cab — the little operator’s booth at the aircraft end.

An agent or a dedicated bridge operator drives that cab out to the plane, lines the canopy up against the door, and extends a soft accordion bumper so there’s no gap and no weather getting in. The height matters more than people think. A regional jet’s door sits far lower than a widebody’s, so the bridge has to raise or drop to meet each aircraft, then re-level as the plane gets heavier with fuel and bags or lighter as it empties.

None of that is hard, right up until it is. A bridge that won’t retract can strand an entire flight while maintenance is paged, and a misjudged approach can put a dent in an aircraft door that costs the airline its whole schedule for the day. It looks like a hallway. It behaves like a forklift.

Who Invented the Jet Bridge? A Short, Specific History

The modern concept is usually credited to Frank Der Yuen, an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer who, as Flightradar24’s history of the jet bridge tells it, licensed his design to Lockheed Air Terminal to build the first commercial units.

The timeline is more specific than most people assume. United tested an early fixed prototype it called the “Air Dock” in 1954. The first operational jet bridge — Lockheed’s “Aero-Gangplank” — went into service with United at Chicago O’Hare in 1958, and it took roughly 90 seconds to swing into position in front of a United DC-7.

Then came the real race, in the summer of 1959. According to airporthistory.org, American Airlines put the first fully operational modern boarding bridge into service on July 14, 1959, at San Francisco International, at a cost of $100,000. Eight days later, Delta had built and installed its own “Jetway,” made by the Pacific Iron and Steel Corp., at Atlanta — switched on at 5 a.m. on July 22, 1959, in time for the airport’s first DC-8 jet service. I’ll admit a little hometown pride there. Atlanta has been early to the gate for a long time.

Why Jet Bridges Cost So Much — With Real 2023-2024 Price Tags

A single modern jet bridge unit typically runs somewhere between $0.5 million and $1 million-plus, and it comes from a short list of manufacturers: ThyssenKrupp in Germany, JBT Corporation in the U.S., Adelte in Spain, and CIMC TianDa in China. It is not a crowded field.

The real numbers, though, are the ones on recent U.S. invoices — and they run higher than the sticker price of the bridge alone, because you’re also paying for the gate, the power, and the install.

• Cheyenne Regional Airport got its first-ever jet bridge in 2023 for $2 million, and it took six months to build and deliver. The airport’s aviation director noted that only two companies in the world make them. Before that bridge went in, passengers at Cheyenne walked outside across the tarmac and climbed a mobile stairway — which tells you exactly who the change was for.
• Springfield-Branson National Airport is replacing five 30-year-old bridges at about $1 million apiece, backed by $5.3 million in federal funding.
• Charleston International Airport installed new bridges as part of its expansion at roughly $7 million each.

That spread — a million to seven million a gate — is the first clue to the stairs question. A bridge is a capital project, not a fixture you bolt on for a weekend. And once it’s in, it isn’t free to use.

The Real Reason Airlines Skip the Jet Bridge: It’s a Per-Turn Fee

Here is the part the dictionary entries never mention, and it’s the part I watched play out on the schedule every day. Airports charge airlines extra to use a jet bridge or a gate stand, on top of the standard landing fees. You pay to touch the building.

The rates vary wildly. At San Francisco International, renting an airport-owned jet bridge runs about $21 per turn — cheap. At Seattle-Tacoma, Simple Flying reports that Alaska Airlines pays roughly $500 every time a plane boards at one of its rented gates and another $500 every time one deplanes. Call it $1,000 for a single quick turn. Overseas the structure gets even more pointed: London Gatwick charges departing passengers about £14.95 ($20) a head, but knocks roughly £3.48 ($4.76) off that if the airline uses a remote stand with no jet bridge — and daytime parking charges are roughly tripled for a bridge stand versus a remote one.

Now do the math a budget carrier does. Multiply a four-figure per-turn cost across dozens of daily departures, and stairs start to look like free money. Yes — to answer the question everyone actually has — airlines do pay for jet bridges, and the ones running the tightest margins would rather not.

Turnaround Math: Why Some Airlines Call the Jet Bridge “The Kiss of Death”

Money is only half of it. The other half is time, and time is where this gets interesting.

Frontier Airlines just bet $183 million worth of someone else’s money on the idea. In a project completed in 2024 and funded by Denver International, Frontier converted 9 traditional jet-bridge gates into a dedicated 14-gate ground-boarding facility — air stairs and switchback ramps that let passengers board and deplane from both the front and rear doors at once. It sits inside Denver’s concourse layout, where Frontier built its ground-boarding gates, and it is a deliberate rejection of the covered walkway.

Frontier CEO Barry Biffle didn’t hedge about it. He said dual front-and-rear ground boarding “cuts in half the time for boarding and deplaning,” would “reduce our time on the ground between flights by nearly half,” and would “nearly double our number of aircraft operations per gate.” Separately, he called the jet bridge “the kiss of death” for a fast turnaround. Frontier already uses ground boarding at other airports in its network, too — though the setup differs gate by gate, so if you’re flying Frontier elsewhere it’s worth checking Frontier’s terminal and gates at Orlando (MCO) or wherever you’re departing for what to actually expect at your door.

This isn’t a new idea; it’s the European low-cost playbook. Ryanair orders many of its Boeing 737s with factory-optional built-in front-and-rear folding airstairs specifically so it never pays for a jet bridge or a stair-car rental, which lets it load from both doors and turn aircraft in under 30 minutes.

Why does anyone care about a few minutes? Because a 2011 boarding-methods study by Steffen put a price on gate time: roughly $30 for every minute a plane sits at the gate. Trim one minute across the industry’s roughly 1,500 daily flights and, on that estimate, you’re looking at over $16 million a year. The jet bridge is comfortable. It is also, for a certain kind of airline, a meter that never stops running.

US Airports Where You’ll Still Climb the Stairs

So where does this actually land on your itinerary? More places than you’d guess. A few U.S. airports and gates where the stairs are normal, not a malfunction:

• Long Beach (LGB) — the clearest example in the country. Long Beach Airport still boards entirely by stairs, across the tarmac, no bridges at all.
• Hollywood Burbank (BUR) — Bob Hope’s old airport primarily uses ground loading rather than jet bridges, the other classic secondary-California example.
• Aspen/Pitkin County (ASE) — you board via a switchback ramp, which is exactly the kind of setup Frontier and Ryanair are chasing.
• Key West (EYW) — historically boarded by stairs across the tarmac, before its terminal remodel added jet bridges.
• San Jose (SJC) — has run non-jet-bridge gates during construction phases.
• Cheyenne (CYS) — the tarmac-and-mobile-stairway routine, right up until its first bridge arrived in 2023.

If you fly regional routes, budget carriers, or into smaller fields, treat the stairs as a feature of the trip, not a surprise. Dress for a few steps of weather.

What This Means If You Use a Wheelchair or Have Limited Mobility

This is the part I always want travelers to hear clearly, because it’s a real worry and not a footnote. No jet bridge does not mean no help.

Under the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Air Carrier Access Act rules, airlines and airports must make ramps or mechanical lifts available to service most flights when level-entry boarding through a jet bridge isn’t available. Airlines have to provide prompt boarding and deplaning assistance, and they cannot leave a passenger who isn’t independently mobile unattended for more than 30 minutes.

In plain terms: if you use a wheelchair, a walker, or just can’t manage stairs, a stair-boarding flight is still your flight. The practical move is to flag it when you book and again at the gate, so the crew has the lift or ramp staged before the aircraft is ready. And give yourself a little extra cushion — assisted boarding often happens first, but it works best when nobody’s rushing. If you’re not sure how much margin to build in, we walk through how much arrival buffer you actually need by airport and time of day. When I worked the line, the flights that went smoothly were the ones where the passenger told us early. That one heads-up changes everything.

Jet Bridge vs. Stairs: Which Boards Faster?

Here’s the counterintuitive payoff, and it’s the thing that surprises most people. The stairs can be faster.

Real-world simulations and field studies of airplane boarding keep finding the same result: using two aircraft doors — front and rear, the way ground and stair boarding do — can cut boarding and deplaning time roughly in half compared with a single jet bridge feeding only the front door. That’s the entire operational logic behind Ryanair, and now behind Frontier’s Denver experiment. One door is a bottleneck. Two doors is a highway with an on-ramp at each end.

I’ll be honest about the trade, because a good gate agent always is. A jet bridge is climate-controlled, it’s step-free, and it shelters you from a downpour or a Wyoming wind. Stairs are quicker and cheaper but they put you outside, and on a bad-weather ramp that’s a real cost. Which one “wins” depends on whether you’re optimizing for the airline’s turn time or your own dry shoes. The airlines have made their choice clear. Now you know why.

FAQ

What’s another name for a jet bridge? Quite a few. Its technical name is a passenger boarding bridge, and you’ll also hear jetway (which started as Delta’s brand name), aerobridge, and air jetty. All the same piece of equipment.

How much does a jet bridge cost? The bridge unit itself typically runs about $0.5 million to $1 million-plus. Installed at a real gate, recent U.S. projects have ranged from around $1 million each at Springfield-Branson to $2 million for Cheyenne’s first-ever bridge to roughly $7 million each at Charleston International. Only a handful of manufacturers worldwide build them, which keeps prices firm.

What is the longest jet bridge in America? There’s no official public ranking, so be wary of any confident single answer. Bridges are built to reach a specific gate’s setback and a specific aircraft door, so length varies a lot from gate to gate — the ones serving remote widebody stands at big international terminals tend to be the longest, but no authoritative list crowns one champion.

Do airlines pay for jet bridges? Yes. On top of standard landing fees, airports bill airlines to use a bridge or gate stand — anywhere from about $21 per turn at San Francisco to a reported ~$1,000 for a single board-and-deplane at Alaska’s rented Sea-Tac gates. London Gatwick even discounts its per-passenger charge for airlines that skip the bridge and use a remote stand. Those fees are exactly why budget carriers keep reaching for the stairs.