Fewer flights cause concerns for soldiers’ holiday travels

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — It’s a Virginia Peninsula tradition — several hundred soldiers camping out, sometimes for days, at the Newport News airport, waiting for flights home for the holidays — and it’s got people around the facility worried.

“I’m concerned there won’t be enough flights,” said Diane Fry, director of the USO office at Newport News/Williamsburg International Airport, as she pauses to talk about how volunteers traditionally pitch in with meals, treats, entertainment and visits for soldiers as they wait.

Mike Giardino, the airport’s executive director, is even blunter:

“We just don’t have enough seats,” he said.

Block leave at the holidays eases up the usual limitations on how many service members can be on leave at any one time — it’s a recognition that young people, some of whom are far from family and friends, really need the time off.

Giardino remembers that from his Navy career — as well as some his own 20-plus-hour nonstop highway marathons.

“I was 22, I wanted to get home for Christmas and I was for sure gonna get home for Christmas,” he said.

And Giardino, the one-time commander of a 250-sailor aviation maintenance department at Naval Station Norfolk, remembering the holiday season lectures about safe driving that his senior chief used to insist on, worries that not enough flights means too many soldiers hitting the road for their own version of an overlong drive home.

For years, the airport has tried to help out by opening up its usually shuttered B concourse to host the soldiers and working closely with USO and community volunteers to make the wait for flights as painless as possible. Soldiers arrive in busloads — the first lot, often at 1 a.m., more than a week before Christmas. There’s a regular bus shuttle back to Fort Eustis as they return to Newport News after New Year’s Day.

But with 500 to 800 soldiers flying, some inevitably end up waiting — “then there’s always the ones who were sleeping when their flight was announced and we have to find another for them,” Fry said.

“We’ll bring in Santa, people will come with candy — I’ve seen soldiers lining up at 4 a.m., just like kids, when they come around.”

Fry and Giardino think social distancing in the terminal, and the airlines’ firm rules about masks and in-flight ventilation make flying a safer alternative to driving.

But the pandemic has hammered airlines, and at the Newport News airport that’s translated to a drop in service — from the seven daily flights American Airlines used to fly to Charlotte, N.C., and three to Philadelphia, the carrier is now averaging a bit more than three daily flights to the North Carolina airport. Delta, which had offered three daily flights to Atlanta, stopped flying that route in the spring.

“They’ve had to furlough people, cut services … they’re bleeding cash,” Giardino said.

The airport isn’t. Major belt-tightening as it cleaned house after the previous board and management secretly spent $5 million of public funds to try to get the short-lived People Express Airlines launched means the airport currently has little debt. Its annual interest cost is $292,000, nothing like the millions of dollars a year in interest other airports pay.

Giardino said he is hoping the airport’s board of commissioners will agree with him that offering airlines a temporary break on terminal rents and landing fees — he calls it a kind of thank-you gesture — might help get some more flights.

Block leave at the holidays eases up the usual limitations on how many service members can be on leave at any one time — it’s a recognition that young people, some of whom are far from family and friends, really need the time off.