The six planes that were diverted to Logan from Kennedy on Saturday and Sunday, Mr. Smith said, included an Air Europa flight from Madrid and a Japan Airlines flight from Tokyo. Boston was the second of two unscheduled stops the Japanese plane made. It had nearly reached Kennedy when it was diverted to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. After leaving O’Hare for Kennedy, it was rerouted to Boston, where it stayed overnight while some of the passengers made it to New York by bus.

By the weekend, while thousands of suitcases were piling up at Kennedy, all was calm at Logan. Massport’s fleet of snow-removal equipment, which includes 14 plows with 27-foot blades and a rubber-tracked snow-groomer designed for a ski resort, had quickly cleared the airport’s six runways.

“Top-down management is sort of out of fashion these days,” Mr. Glynn said. But, he added, “top-down management works here and it works because people have respect for those at the top.”

Logan, of course, is smaller than Kennedy, and handles only a fraction of the international passengers that Kennedy does. But the responses from officials of the Port Authority in the last several weeks imply that the different management structures of the two airports explain much of the gap in performance.

Rick Cotton, the executive director of the Port Authority, has repeatedly apologized and vowed that there would not be a repeat. The agency appointed the former transportation secretary Ray H. LaHood to investigate what happened at Kennedy and said it would immediately make several changes in procedures. Among those changes would be to require airlines to notify the Port Authority whenever a plane is not assigned to a gate within 90 minutes of landing.

Speaking to an air-travel industry group in Manhattan recently, the Port Authority’s director of aviation, Huntley Lawrence, admitted that the agency had paid too little attention to passengers. Reflecting back to the 1960s, when the Port Authority first turned management of terminals over to private companies, he said: “No one ever dreamed that meant we would abdicate control of the customer experience at our airports. But we did.”

Now, Mr. Lawrence added, according to the text of his speech, “those days are over.”

Mr. Cotton said that Port Authority officials would await Mr. LaHood’s report, which is expected this spring. But, he added, “if his recommendation is that the Port Authority needs to take a more aggressive role, the Port Authority will take a more aggressive role.”