If air service resumes as promised between New Haven and Washington, D.C, flyers may save hours on a round trip — because they won’t need to line up to be screened.
So said Matt Chaifetz, chief commercial officer of Tennessee-based Corporate Flight Management (CFM).
Chaifetz confirmed Thursday that his company is close to a deal to begin flying thrice-a-day round trips from Tweed-New Haven Airport to Dulles International Airport through its Buzz Airways subsidiary as early as June.
The company would fly 19-seat turbo-prop planes in the early morning, mid-day, and late afternoon or early evening to Dulles, with flights then returning here, he said. The flights would cost between $99 (purchased enough in advance) and $299 (same-day). Unlike the commercial jets New Haven has sought to bring back to Tweed, these would not require a lengthened runway. Eventually, if demand increases, the company might add a fourth round-trip flight or expand to 30-seat planes, Chaifetz said.
“We’re very interested in finalizing everything,” Chaifetz said. “We think the service has a ton of potential” in New Haven.
Technically, these would be “charter” flights, not regular commercial flights. They would operate out of a currently unused older wing of the airport, separate from the main terminal. Because flights on charter planes under 31 seats are exempt from federal screening rules, passengers won’t have to arrive an hour early on either end of the trip to remove their shoes, empty their pockets, and have their bodies and baggage scanned, Chaifetz said.
That’ll save enough time that passengers will be able to travel door-to-door from downtown New Haven to downtown D.C. in under three hours, Chaifetz said.
Here’s his math:
• Drive 15 minutes from downtown New Haven to Tweed.
• Arrive at the terminal 15 minutes early. (Breeze through in 3 minutes.)
• Spend an hour and 25 minutes in Buzz transit — about an hour in the air, the rest taxiing.
• Walk 10 minutes to the cab stand at Dulles.
• Ride 40 minutes into the heart of D.C.
(That math differs slightly from that at a presentation for local business leaders Wednesday, which assumed 45 minutes for the D.C. cab ride and 1 hours 35 minutes in the Buzz plane. Chaifetz said he believes the typical cab ride is more like 40 minutes, and he said he double-checked records to arrive at the hour-25-minute estimate.) And travelers interested in avoiding D.C. traffic also now have access to a bus that will quickly connect them to the recently completed silver line of the metro rail system.
“We looked at the type of traveler we anticipate using the New Haven service. While the service is open to everyone, we expect the majority” to be traveling for business, Chaifetz said. Those travelers prize saving time.
Whatever the precise number of minutes, the cost and time beat traveling by Amtrak, noted city Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson. Amtrak’s website shows New Haven-to‑D.C. trains running five hours or more and costing more than $400. He also noted the time flyers would save not having to drive first to Bradley or LaGuardia.
Further, while people consider National Airport more convenient than Dulles in D.C., Nemerson said, it’ll actually be quicker to go through Dulles through Buzz because of the lack of a TSA check-in. Not to mention the time saved returning home from Tweed rather than Bradley.
Nemerson’s office has worked with the quasi-public Economic Development Corporation and the Tweed New Haven Airport Authority to bring the D.C. air service here. They’re looking to enlist or create a local corporate entity to be in charge of the service. That entity would perhaps do some marketing, Nemerson said. Otherwise it would hire Buzz in a “turn-key” deal to handle all the reservations in addition to providing the planes and crews.
EDC Executive Director Virginia Kozlowski said the service would meet a demonstrated need.
“Greater New Haven generates over four million air travelers per year. However, an estimated 62 percent of domestic passengers within Tweed’s ‘catchment area’ use out-of-state airports,” an EDC released quoted Kozlowski as saying. “While, strong market research has supported the demand for service between New Haven and Washington, D.C., Tweed’s insufficient runway length has been an insurmountable barrier when negotiating with the major carriers.”
A Disrupted Industry
The pending Buzz deal reflects changes in the airline industry. Major airlines have gone out of business or merged with others in recent years. Fewer commercial carriers fly now, and they fly fewer, more packed planes than before. They’ve cut service to smaller airports all over the country like Tweed, which hasn’t offered flights to D.C. or other points beyond Philadelphia in more than a decade.
Enter charter companies like CFM. They saw an opportunity. And they took it.
Nemerson noted that charter companies have in recent years moved to fill the gap with regular flights. Some smaller cities obtained federal money that helped bring those charter flights, but New Haven is too big to qualify for that aid, Nemerson said.
CFM, founded in 1982, originally operated private jets for “high-net-worth individuals” and execs, according to Chaifetz. In the Great Recession, Fortune 500 companies started hiring the company to run employees back and forth between locations several days a week using their fleet of Jetstream turboprop aircraft. NASCAR, NCAA basketball, volleyball and soccer teams hired the company. So did casinos.
“We were kind of surprised at how much demand there was for 19 and 30-passenger aircraft,” Chaifetz said.
Then came the industry consolidation, along with a pilot shortage.
“So many airports were coming to us, saying, ‘We can’t get American. We can’t get Delta. You have the type of airplanes we need. Can you fly here?’” Chaifetz recalled. “We heard enough of this for so long, we said, ‘OK, we need to find a way to do this.’”
CFM contracted with a call center and a reservation system. It also needed a name that sounded sexier to market than “Corporate Flight Management.” Hence the birth of its “Buzz” brand.
“It’s almost like a private label, like a white label in a supermarket,” Chaifetz said. “We’re the manufacturer. Say we’re peanut butter. It may be the Waldbaum’s brand in New York. It may be the Publix brand in Florida. In markets where we’re not hooked up to a grocery store, maybe we started our own brand. That’s what Buzz is. Buzz is for an airport that doesn’t have a brand already. They’re looking for somebody to do everything.”
Federal rules do differ for “charter” and regular “commercial” airlines beyond the lack of a need for TSA screening on smaller flights. CFM must keep its customers’ payments in escrow until a flight operates, Chaifetz said. The differences aren’t apparent to the customer, he added.
Buzz began seasonal daily flights last year from Branson, Missouri to Chicago and to Houston. “From day one,” Chaifetz said, “we were going 80 percent” filled. The same, he predicted, can happen in New Haven.
Good idea, but using the private section at National which has a separate terminal, and existing parking spaces, would cut the cab ride at least in half, allow use of the existing Metro direct to Congress and many major hotels; and even shorten the air trip a bit, as National is also closer to Tweed than is Dulles,
Still, using the proposed Dulles set-up is a big improvement, and the price is great.