The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Randall Beach: Time has come for Tweed to spread its wings
We used to call it “Dweeb” Airport in our family.
Yes, for many years my wife and I ignored and even mocked Tweed New Haven Regional Airport. It has been irrelevant to our lives, as it is to many people around here.
Although we live in New Haven, in the East Rock neighborhood, just a 10-15 minute drive to the airport if it’s not rush hour, there are so few flights that we instead have relied on Bradley International Airport. Sometimes, under duress, we will make the hellish drive to New York to use JFK International Airport.
I have flown out of Tweed just once, in the 1980s, because I was doing a freelance story about then-new flights to Long Island. (They were discontinued long ago.)
Every so often, Tweed can offer an angle on stories about a president landing there or a celebrity. I was on hand one day circa 1982 to write about singer Barrry Manilow arriving in conjunction with a show he was doing at the New Haven Coliseum. It was a hoot: hundreds of women screaming and weeping as if the Beatles had landed.
My family’s dismissive opinion on Tweed changed in the past two weeks. Last month, when our younger daughter was preparing to book a flight to Connecticut from Los Angeles, where she now lives, I suggested she look into any options about using Tweed. I figured it was a long shot, but what the heck.
Much to my surprise, she discovered she could fly from Los Angeles to Philadelphia on American Airlines, and from there get a flight to Tweed. And she could reverse that process when returning to California. This is all Tweed offers commercially: three flights a day to or from Philadelphia. But for us, it worked. Quite by coincidence, our rediscovery and use of Tweed came amidst a renewed debate over a proposal by the City of New Haven, which owns the airport, to expand the main runway from its current 5,600 feet to 6,600 feet.
We have repeatedly seen that the obstacle to expansion is opposition by people living in the surrounding neighborhood. (The airport straddles the New Haven and East Haven line.)
New Haven municipal leaders, including Mayor Toni N. Harp, support expanding the runway because they believe it’s essential for the airport’s future as well as for our region’s economic future. Michael Piscitelli, the city’s deputy economic development administrator, said if the airport could have flights to and from Washington, D.C., Chicago and Florida, it would result in $32 million of economic output while creating 310 direct and indirect jobs. In a time of economic stress for New Haven and Connecticut, revenue sources are essential.
The New Haven Board of Alders on May 7 approved a resolution supporting a state bill to lengthen the runway. But last week, the state Legislature declined to act on the bill, which would have removed restrictions on the runway length. Key legislators, including State Senate President Pro Tempore Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven — who lives near the airport — said more time is needed to address the concerns of airport neighbors. They are concerned about increased noise and traffic.
Amid all of this debating, my daughter landed at Tweed in the early afternoon of May 1. I was unable to join my wife for the homecoming but she drove out there, paid just $3 to park in the airport lot for 15-20 minutes, greeted our daughter and then did the easy drive back to our home.
“It was nice,” my wife said. “Unbelievably nice.”
The return flight had a 6:05 a.m. departure on Sunday, May 6. Because we live so close to Tweed, we didn’t have to get up at something like 3 or 4 a.m. to get to another airport. We had an easy drive over “the Q Bridge” at 5:15 a.m., parked in the airport lot via the automatic gate and said goodbye to our daughter. Here was a shocker: the gate lifted on our way out; no charge! We had been there for only about 10 minutes, but still: free parking at an airport?
Our only challenge was finding a diner that was open at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday. We drove through dark downtown East Haven but then came upon the Twin Pines Diner, its lights on! They’re a 24hour operation.
When we returned to our street, our next-door neighbors were headed off on a trip that required them to drive to JFK Airport. Oh, no! Not JFK! We wished them luck.
As for the NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) issue at Tweed, I understand why the people living nearby aren’t happy about the prospect of more noise and traffic if the runway eventually is expanded. That would drive me nuts if I lived there. But guess what, I would never have bought a home in that area, knowing there’s an airport in the neighborhood.
It’s been there for about 80 years. This didn’t sneak up on anybody.
It’s also worth noting that in the 1990s Tweed served up to four airlines. If it had that longer runway, Southwest and Jet Blue would come in to provide flights. In that “thriving” time of the 1990s, Tweed served about 130,000 passengers annually. In 2007, that number was down to about 40,000.
The airport’s neighbors aren’t being ignored. Dan Haar, business columnist for Hearst Connecticut Media reminded us a noise-abatement program is under way in which 184 houses will be outfitted with insulation, windows, doors and new cooling systems. That’s being financed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which would also pay for most of the $12 million cost of expanding the runway.
Haar wrote that we need a true regional airport, “not just a bus station with wings,” and I agree with him. The time has come.