|
|
|
Square Peg, Round Hole
Is expanding Tweed worth the effort, or is the region better off creating better ground links to bigger airports?
|
Business New Haven
11/15/1999
By: Michael C. Bingham
|
Regions with small, under-performing airports such as Tweed-New Haven Airport should would be better off forgetting their pretensions to greatness and concentrate instead on improving ground connections to major airports.
That's the conclusion of Southern Connecticut State University economics professor James A. Thorson in a draft paper titled “Accessibility and Utilization of Local Airports.” The author argues that small airports are losing passengers to large airports nationwide - some quite rapidly - and that by bucking the marketplace, local economic-development officials are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Employing data from the Air Carrier Information System of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Thorson asserts that large U.S. airports - defined as those with 500,000 or more annual “enplanements” - grew by an average of more than 20 percent between 1993 and 1997. During the same period, their smaller, more numerous brethren on average grew little or not at all - and in fact more than a quarter of them lost passengers.
“The problems experienced by Tweed-New Haven Airport are not unique,” asserts Thorson. “The majority of small airports have either grown very little or declined in passenger usage during the time period studied.
“This suggests that small airports in general are having problems and that our public-investment dollars may be better spent in increasing capacity at our larger airports and perhaps increasing transportation options to and from those airports.”
Concludes Thorson, “State and local officials who are engaged in an effort to rescue Tweed from its current problems may be waging a futile battle.”
Jeffrey T. Wack, a member of the Tweed-New Haven Airport Authority, disagrees. “That flies in face of the success of a number of rapidly growing smaller airports, including Manchester, N.H. and T.F. Green [in Warwick, R.I.],” says Wack (see related story, page 12). Wack also cites FAA projections that air travel is expected to grow by 30 percent between now and 2010.
Thorson counters that much of the success of regional airports such as T.F. Green can be attributed to the presence of such low-cost carriers as Southwest Airlines, which has a depressing effect on air fares for all carriers serving that airport.
In New Haven, he argues, “When there were three airlines serving Tweed, air fares were relatively low. Now that only one airline is left [U.S. Air Express], air fares have gone up.” Thorson says price and convenience are key reasons air travelers choose one facility over another when multiple options exist.
|
Go FirstGo PreviousGo
NextGo LastGo
to Index
|
|
