Paul Bass Photo
Jorge Roberts & Sean Scanlon, prime movers behind airport expansion deal, at WNHH FM: First pleasure flights, then business.
Avports
Rendering for rebuilt airport.
Jorge Roberts can picture hydrogen-powered, passenger-filled, autonomous airplanes — aka “drones for adults” — descending and ascending at Tweed New Haven one day without needing a runway.
These airplanes have a name: “electrical vertical take-off and landing vehicles.”
They don’t exist yet. The race is on to develop and build them. It will be years upon years, if not decades, before they’d actually appear at New Haven’s airport.
Roberts is thinking in those terms. He’s taking the long view.
Roberts is the CEO of Avports, a private subsidiary of Goldman Sachs that manages 10 commercial airports and military airfields across the country. Including Tweed. His company has struck a tentative deal — subject to public approvals — to continue managing the airport for another 43 years and pump an alleged $70 million into upgrading it. (Read more about that here and here.)
Roberts and Sean Scanlon, executive director of the Tweed Airport Authority, with which Avports contracts, discussed the details of that deal Tuesday during an appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
In the process, they described their vision for the airport’s future, not just in the Jetsons age when “adult drones” fall out of the sky, but when specific plans are set to take flight in coming months, then in upcoming years.
The first change: A new budget airline called Avelo plans to start flying daily to four Florida cities in November. (Read about that here.) Scanlon is hoping to win approval Wednesday night from New Haven’s City Plan Commission for the site plan for $5 million in initial terminal improvements to enable the service to launch.
First Leisure. Then Business, Too?
Avelo’s announcement thrilled longtime supporters of increased air service at Tweed.
The announcement had one surprising element: Yale and biotech employers weren’t part of the picture making and cheering on the announcement.
That’s because the new service doesn’t address the prime argument those airport boosters have advanced for decades: That Tweed needs to expand in order to lure commercial flights to business-oriented destination, and therefore create jobs in New Haven. The new Avelo flights are geared toward people who want to go on sunny vacations, not to climate-controlled Powerpoint presentations.
“The majority of the demand is on leisure. People want to go to Florida,” Roberts said. “They want to go to Disney World and the beaches.”
“The legacy carriers focus more on that corporate travel. Also they’re network carriers. They’re pulling out of secondary airports. That leaves an opportunity for new entrants like Avelo,” he noted.
In fact, Tweed’s only current commercial flyer, American Airlines, is expected to end flying out of Tweed next month. The airline is apparently not making money on business-oriented flights to Philadelphia — just as in the past, service from Tweed to cities like Chicago didn’t last long.
Scanlon said American’s departure is not certain. But if it occurs, he said, it would result from specific market conditions: “American has a lot of problems right now. If you look at their last quarterly earnings, they are lagging behind the other legacy carriers,” Scanlon said. “Legacy carriers lost a ton of money during Covid.”
Thomas Breen Photo
Avports CEO Jorge Roberts at Aug. 19 announcement of new nonstop Florida flights from Tweed.
He and Roberts said they see business travel as part of the mix as they build on the new Avelo flights from Tweed. They would like to see flights to more destinations, including D.C.. They envision both leisure and business flights to serve a region of a million people who constitute one of the nation’s most underserved markets.
“It’s not an either-or,” Scanlon said.
Scanlon said a “chicken-and-egg problem” explains past business-oriented service failures at Tweed: Airlines said they needed a longer runway. State law prevented Tweed from expanding the runway.
“We never had the infrastructure to move it forward,” Scanlon said. Now, thanks to a 2020 Supreme Court ruling, the matter is settled: Tweed can lengthen the runway, and it now plans to, from 5,600 to 6,635 feet.
The duo said their plans definitely do not include freight service out of Tweed. Opponents of the expansion, including several posting questions during the radio program, fear that story will change in the future, especially with the presence of two nearby Amazon warehouses.
Guarantees & The Environment
Avports
Rendering for rebuilt airport.
Scanlon and Roberts are not expected to serve in their current roles 30 years from now, when this deal would still be in effect. How can people have confidence that the no-freight promise, or other promises, will remain in effect under new leadership that didn’t make those promises?
Asked that question, Scanlon said the 43-year deal will include safeguards that protect the public interest. He said he can’t release those details yet because they’re not written down in a final agreement. The terms of the agreement remain to be negotiated between the authority and Avports after the project wins its government approvals, including a Board of Alders approval of a 43-year lease between the city (which owns Tweed) and the airport authority.
Roberts and Scanlon said they also have both shorter- and longer-term plans to incorporate more environmentally friendly practices into the way the airport is run. Roberts said his company is looking into charging stations that would enable Tweed and other Avport-run airports to convert ground fleets to electric vehicles. Scanlon is promising to craft a carbon-neutral plan for the airport’s expansion. The industry, the pair said, is in the midst of a wholesale reexamination of its carbon footprint.
That said, Scanlon also noted that airplanes contribute an estimated 2 percent to climate change. And “we’re not at a point as a country of getting rid of airplanes.” Scanlon has been knocking on doors of the airport’s neighbors in New Haven’s Morris Cove neighborhood and in East Haven; while vocal opponents may dominate public debates, the majority of neighbors actually support the expansion, he maintained.
Avports
Another view of rebuilt airport rendering.
Click on the video of the episode to watch Robert and Scanlon elaborate on their plans for Tweed and answer a steady stream of questions posed by airport expansion opponents during their appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” The public is also invited to a meeting with Tweed brass at Nathan Hale School Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. to discuss the expansion plans; questions can be asked in person, while others can watch the proceedings here.
I have been a supporter of Tweed expansion, based on the premise of increased business flights. This expansion is a bait-and-switch. Florida and Avelo are vacation, not business enterprises. Moreover, none of the Florida destinations are major hubs, although Orlando is a minor one (I can take a flight to Lima from there, but not Rio or Sao Paulo). Business travelers would not need to expanded parking, but long-term vacationers do.