Tweed New Haven Airport is planning a major expansion, but Bradley International executive warns it could lead to fewer flights from Bradley
The executive director of the agency that oversees Bradley International Airport is warning that the planned $100 million expansion of Tweed New Haven Airport could hurt route expansion in Connecticut, unless the two airports coordinate services provided to the state’s traveling public.
“Unconstrained competition between two airports that are located within 50 miles of each other is not necessarily a good thing for either airport,” Kevin A. Dillon, executive director of the quasi-public Connecticut Airport Authority, said.
Dillon said he is wary of the slicing up the Connecticut market and dividing populations of passengers without the airports working with each other. For example, if there are five daily flights to say, Washington D.C., that could be reduced to four — two at Tweed and two at Bradley — removing an option for travelers.
“Is that a deterioration of service?” Dillon said. “I would say yeah. And that’s a very small illustration of what I’m talking about.”
Last week, the Tweed New Haven Airport Authority held a splashy announcement that the airport had reached a deal with Avports, which now operates Tweed. Avports has agreed to invest $100 million over four decades — $70 million in the next two years or so to build a new terminal and longer runway to accommodate more commercial flights — as part of a master lease with the city of New Haven, which owns the airport.
The details of Tweed’s agreement with Avports, owned by investment giant Goldman Sachs, aren’t expected to become public until at least this summer, once approval by New Haven’s board of alders is sought for the deal.
Dillon said he has not been contacted by Tweed or seen the details of the Avports agreement.
Sean Scanlon, executive director of Tweed’s airport authority, said this week a study by Tweed showed there are about a million people in what it considers its market: south of Middletown and Meriden; east to Old Saybrook and west to Fairfield.
“Statistically, those million people more often than not go to New York to fly and not to Bradley,” Scanlon said. “So we don’t really view this as a competition with Bradley. Yeah, in some sense, maybe it would be, but we’re not looking at them as where we are going to take from. It’s more about a two-airport strategy for Connecticut.”
Scanlon, who also represents Branford and Guilford in the state House of Representatives, said it is about “how we can meet the needs of Connecticut together. It’s not about a competition.”
Tweed has long sought a larger role in the state’s commercial air travel industry, and Gov. Lamont, soon after taking office in 2019, supported the idea.
The CAA’s Dillon said competition with Bradley would certainly result without some mechanism for coordinating the service. The CAA has had longstanding discussions with Tweed about the need for coordination, so much so that so that there has been talks in the past about the CAA either acquiring Tweed or operating it.
“That’s how strongly I feel about the need for coordination,” Dillon said. “If Tweed is able to get a $100 million private investment and still maintain a commitment to coordination, that’s a great thing.”
Dillon said he fully supports private investment in airport infrastructure. The $225 million transportation center now under construction at Bradley, for instance, will be paid for by rental car fees.
Dillon said CAA involvement at Tweed would be all but off the table should the Avports deal go forward.
Bradley also has embarked on a 20-year expansion plan that includes the new transportation center and possibly a second terminal, if passenger traffic growth — hit with the setback in the pandemic — regains the same momentum it experienced pre-COVID-19.
How Avports will approach an expansion at Tweed remains to be seen. It also manages airports in nearby New York, in Albany, Westchester County and Orange County and how its priorities for those airports will affect Tweed also remains to be seen.
As a private company, Avports will be expected to turn a profit, make a return for its investors and develop a plan for Tweed that will meet those objectives.
“They’ve modeled this in a way that they feel will allow them to make money and pay back their investment,” Scanlon said.
Contact Kenneth R. Gosselin at kgosselin@courant.com.
