Obituary of Susan May Baer

From the New York Times Susan M. Baer, the first person to run all three major airports in the New York metropolitan area for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the first woman to be named its aviation director, died on Tuesday at her home in Upper Montclair, N.J. She was 65. The cause was cancer, her husband, Joseph Martella, said. A longtime official for the Port Authority, Ms. Baer was also the first woman to run the Lincoln Tunnel, which connects New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River. She ran the airports successively: La Guardia from 1994 to 1998, Newark Liberty International until 2007, and John F. Kennedy International until 2008. At each she directed modernization efforts, including major investments by Delta and JetBlue, and advanced the installation of the NextGen satellite navigation technology to reduce flight delays and improve safety. (In Newark she also oversaw Teterboro, a general aviation field in New Jersey.) When she was named the agency’s aviation director in 2009, her responsibilities expanded to include Atlantic City International Airport in New Jersey and Stewart International Airport, near Newburgh, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. She oversaw a staff of more than 930 aviation department employees, a $2.3 billion operating budget and $500 million in construction spending. Her career touched on nearly every form of transportation, beginning with the Panama Canal, where, after college, she worked for a nongovernmental agency. Hired by the Port Authority in 1976 after returning from Panama, she immediately found that the agency’s reputation as a male bastion was justified. “They wanted women who could type,” she recalled, as quoted in 2006 in Tom Murphy’s book “Reclaiming the Sky: 9/11 and the Untold Story of the Men and Women Who Kept America Flying.” “I convinced them that after traveling on my own through South and Central America, I could take whatever they gave me.” She joined the Port Authority as a management analyst, working in the tunnels, bridges and terminals departments, before joining aviation in 1988. Ms. Baer was on duty in Newark on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when two jetliners, commandeered by terrorists, crashed into the World Trade Center. She had a view of the attack from the fourth-floor window of the airport’s administration building. She immediately halted all departures from Newark, 14 minutes before the Federal Aviation Administration shut airports nationwide. Susan May Baer was born in Allentown, Pa., on Aug. 25, 1950, the daughter of Kurt Baer, a construction supervisor, and the former Elizabeth Bader. She earned a bachelor’s degree in urban studies and anthropology from Barnard College in 1972 and a master’s degree in business from New York University. In addition to Mr. Martella, a retired Port Authority police captain, she is survived by their children, Nick, Lizzie and Jack; her sister, Sally Kuhn; and her brothers, John and Kurt. When she retired in 2013 after 37 years at the Port Authority to join Arup, an engineering consulting firm, as global aviation planning leader, s. Baer acknowledged her role as a pioneer. “What I’ve tried to do with it is give other women opportunities, and that’s something all women should be doing,” she told USA Today. “It was hard for us to get here, but we ought to be making it easier for the people who are coming behind us.” THE FAMILY REQUESTS NO FLOWERS. PLEASE MAKE DONATIONS TO WWW.SAFEPASSAGE.ORG IN SUE'S MEMORY.