Next Stop: Traverse City

To your other airline carrier destinations listed in the below comment, all are great suggestions! We need an airline service with cross county and international hub airport destinations to accommodate leisure, college/university related travel, and business travel.
If New Haven metro is going to be the states largest city, and our largest growing business industries are mostly along the shoreline, traveling all the way up to Bradley just south of the Massachusetts border is not helpful.
Hartford may be our state Capitol, but the majority of our state lives and works in the southern half of the state, and the Bradley Airport is a long haul, with no direct train service.
Tweed is better positioned to serve the majority of our state residents and businesses needs and has more transit options that could be easily put in place.
But the state needs to invest in Shoreline East train service so more commuters can have dependable service that meets their schedule needs. And the line should be extended into RI and beyond to the Cape. The New Haven railroad used to go to Cape Cod and stop at all the shoreline communities along the way. Can you imagine taking a train to the airport, hopping on a shuttle to get you from the train station to the airport? Or taking the train to the shuttle in New London which would take you to the casinos? Or taking the train to get to the Groton base and submarine factory? To get to Hammonasset beach or to RI beaches or the Cape beaches and places to enjoy the weekend or a vacation?
If youre young and able bodied you could take a backpack and your bike and a tent and explore without a vehicle and get away for vacation by train or by airplane.
If you dont own a car and you want to get to manufacturing or casino jobs, you could hop on the train and the shuttle. It would open up good jobs for more people if they had better mass transportation options.

My predictions as to the next airlines at Tweed. Delta, Atlanta is the largest hub in the country. United, O'Hare and Washington Dulles, lots of domestic and International connections. Southwest, Baltimore and Midway Chicago hubs, good fares and great service. With these 3, Avelo, Delta and United, travelers will say, Bradley what?

Im all for intermodal concepts with HVN as the centerpiece. That said, I wonder how such things would interface with the community? Mind you, Im a major supporter of Tweed, but I do think we should be mindful about encouraging much more growth.

I am confident in the future of HVN and that the upcoming improvements are not an expansion, but rather improvements. Beyond what is proposed in the AMP, I would like to see Tweed remain in the given footprint and not actually expand.

Finally, while I like options for different means of getting to Tweed, I wonder if anything outside of cars would ever gain any real traction.

To your red tape comment below-
Sure, its going to take time, CT moves slowly to get things done, but major employers and municipalities are pushing for more and better mass transit to meet passenger and employer needs.
The Shoreline East train crowd in many towns are pushing for better service and a return to pre-pandemic service. Which would help the towns east of New Haven thrive.
The state and the Feds are aware of the increasing shoreline flooding issues. The US Army Corp of Engineers are going to have to address flooding at airports, train tracks, and municipalities all along the Eastern Seaboard.
Avelo has proven their success and the growing customer demand, despite the short runway and tiny antiquated terminal and flooding issues.
New Haven is on track to be the states largest city, much to Hartford and Bradleys dismay, the battle for being the center of CTs universe that has been long standing between Hartford and New Haven is on the way to be decisively won by our little (but growing) city.

A lot of "They could" items on your list. Keep in mind the state and local governments have two speeds, slow and stop. Too much red tape in your requests. First things first, the two most needed projects are the runway and terminal. The FAA has deemed the current plans will not upset the area and all projects will be done inside Tweed's property lines.
Avelo has done what no other airline has ever done at Tweed, show what a tremendous market there is for airline service. The planned service to Charlotte has already been upgraded from two weekly flights to four weekly flights and the flights don't start till June.
Tweed is finally reclaiming it's passengers from Bradley field, you know, that airport one town away from Massachusetts and it all happened during my lifetime.

New Haven will never do West Coast or Europe, unless a larger carrier(Delta) comes in, but they wouldn't short-hop to Boston, New York or Philadelphia with a light load. New Haven becoming a 'feeder' to a hub is kind of unlikely. The 737's can make it to Ireland, but only good for 1 round-trip a day, which means once weekly service, if that. Same with the West coast - not enough payback for the plane's costs. They need minimum 2 round-trips per day to keep the planes busy. Delta was flying 4 full round-trips every Saturday for a while, and geuss what - they pulled them to force passengers to Atlanta so they could fill other connections as well. Airlines are in it to win it - for themselves. Keep it real, keep it 'close' so the 737's can run efficient, multiple trips. That's the local low-cost model - look at RyanAir for the model, they're making work by constantly deleting poor performing routes while trying new ones.

To compare New Haven to Chicago is not reasonable. Chicago Metropolitan Area/Population
9.459 million, New Haven metro population 861,113. Tweed will always be a small regional airport, no jumbo, wide body planes, no freight hub and no hourly airline shuttles. Also no rail line direct to Tweed, again, a small regional airport is what Tweed is and always will will be.

Steve- Im taking about making it easier to get around the state and get to the airport by train to shuttle or bus to the airport. And talking about how Chicagoland transit makes it easy to get to the airports and attractions and employers, so CT would be wise to invest in more mass transit options so you dont have to rely on a personal vehicle. Especially the lower half of the state from the NY border to the RI border, concentrating on New Haven as the soon to be largest city, and a growing economic center for the state.
We only have small cities because we dont have boroughs or counties the way other larger metros do in other states. But if we regionalized, we would have much larger cities, more buying power, shared resources and expenses.
But for transit options a state wide approach concentrating on the counties and municipalities that have airports, the most people, and the major employers would make sense in a small state like ours.

Even Bradley can't make a train work. Figure how many trains daily would be needed. Flights start at 6am and go to 6-8pm. Passengers would need to arrive 2 hours prior to departure. About 6-7 daily trains would be needed to meet the flights all during the day. Years back it was said train service to Bradley would lose money, not a lot enough flights at Bradley as compared to LGA, JFK,etc. Tweed being close to I-95 is a plus and with some road enhancements, driving to Tweed is not bad at all. I agree dedicated buses to Tweed could work but again, with flights all throughout the day, a steady stream of buses would be needed. Even now if dedicated buses to Tweed can be instituted, that would remove some of the car traffic I-95 to Tweed.
Avelo has brought great service but also more passengers than Tweed ever had. Back in 1993, the yearly passenger total was 132,000, the best Tweed ever had, a small fraction of what Tweed handles now.
The dedicated buses would be a good first step. Rome was not built in a day and Tweed will take time to reach it's potential however, Tweed will never rival large commercial airports and that's a good thing as people said they like the ease of departing and arriving at Tweed.