Exclusive: Avelo Airlines CEO Andrew Levy on the reanimation of Tweed Airport

For many years, Tweed New Haven Airport was a relatively sleepy corner of New England”™s aviation space. Forced by a 2009 state law to maintain a relatively short 5,600-foot runway ”“ that law was voided in a 2019 federal court decision ”“ the airport”™s toehold into the commercial airline sector was American Airlines”™ service connecting New Haven with Philadelphia International Airport. But that service, which began in 2013, was discontinued last September.

Two months after American departed for good, the startup Avelo Airlines began service with routes to four cities in Florida. Earlier this month, Avelo announced its 15th Tweed route, connecting the shoreline to South Carolina”™s Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport beginning on June 22. On March 24, the airline recorded its one millionth passenger out of New Haven.

For Fairfield County residents who needed to drive across Connecticut for flights out of Bradley International Airport or drive across the state line for service from the New York airports, having a wider selection of Tweed flights on a budget carrier like Avelo has offered considerable time and cost savings for travel.

In an exclusive interview with the Business Journals, Avelo CEO Andrew Levy discussed this company”™s focus on Tweed and his plans for the airline”™s near future.

Avelo has enjoyed much success at the airport. What is that your company saw in Tweed that other airlines didn’t see?

I don’t know if I’d put it that way, because the key thing that enabled that enabled us to get to Tweed and do what we’re doing isn’t that maybe others didn’t see this. Without the investment that we made and Avports [the airport”™s managing contractor] made, we wouldn’t be there either.

Because of the way it was set up before we went in there, you couldn’t have possibly handled our presence. There may be a flight or two a day ”“ it was tiny. I think what was important was this public-private partnership between the airport authority and Avports, which is a long-term manager of the airport, and then us as the airline willing to come in and commit to putting the airplanes in there. So, the stars kind of aligned for this all to happen.

And there were a lot of hurdles we had to overcome. But there was about $12 million invested into the existing terminal facility to enable it to be built up to a size and scale that allowed us to come in and do what we’re doing. And then on top of that, there’s very few kinds of mainline aircraft that can handle the short runway at Tweed.

We have some 737-700s, and Avelo has a CEO ”“ namely me ”“ who is very comfortable and willing to take a risk on with new airports. I’ve done that forever, so that doesn’t scare me. But it’s different from a lot of other airlines. And at the same time, you had a private entity ”“ namely Avports ”“ that was willing to put the capital in there. And it’s all tied into a much larger deal, which involves them putting a lot more money to expand the runway and build a new terminal on the other side of the field.

So, it’s not that others didn’t think Tweed could be a really great market, because I think that’s been universally believed by many. But it was really kind of getting everything to come together to enable this to happen. And we’re very happy we are there ”“ it has exceeded our expectations. We have just a ton of really, really happy customers and we have nice, friendly crew members. We take people where they want to go they at a terrific low fare, so the combination all that ends with a lot of really happy people.

Avelo”™s service from Tweed is primarily along the East Coast. Do you have any plans to begin flights to the West Coast?

Maybe one day, but there’s certainly no plans in the near term or even in the intermediate term. For flying really far distances like that, it’s hard to get the revenue you need to make that work, for a number of different reasons. It’s just really challenging.

The other challenge we have for now is that the runway is on the short side. And so, as the runway gets extended, that certainly enables flying further distances to become economically viable from an aircraft consideration. The runway being lengthened certainly opens up to more aircraft and economic capability, and it’s possible we would look something further out west ”“ certainly Denver and Las Vegas are markets where people would be quite interested, and then L.A. as well. But you”™ve still got to get the revenue to travel that far. And it’s sometimes it’s tough to get that, especially when you’re flying an all-coach configuration like we do ”“ we don’t have a first-class product to help pay the freight on that kind of stuff. It’s just a little harder to make those numbers work.

The way that we’ve approached the market so far is we like to be a short-haul airline ”“ everything we do is about a short-haul flight. And we define short-haul as two to three hours. If you get further in the air, you start to appreciate or of demand things like WiFi or food or power in the seats ”“ but when you only fly a couple hours, for the most part it is not viewed as a big sacrifice not have any of those things.

With that in mind, how did you determine your Tweed routes?

We started off from Connecticut to Florida ”“ that seemed like a pretty safe bet, so those were the first six routes we operated and they’re doing quite well. We think we can do two or more markets in Florida, so stay tuned for more on that front, but for now we’re going to six.

And then, the other markets we’ve served are similar in nature ”“ they have a very strong leisure component, like Savannah, Charleston, Myrtle Beach. That”™s where a lot of people like to go ”“ they either have second homes or they like to go vacation there or have a getaway.

Wilmington, North Carolina, is a place where there happens to be a lot of second homeownership and a lot of general migration. Raleigh-Durham is same thing with a lot of migration, so those have worked quite well.

We also serve Washington through BWI, which has been a challenging market for us. It’s such a short trip, and we sure love to be in Reagan, but it’s hard to get slots to go to Reagan. So, at the moment, we’re in BWI.

We also serve Chicago Midway, which has been kind of mediocre. As a result, we moved it being seasonally, starting right after the year-end holidays, and we’ll be coming back for the summer. We’re optimistic we could make it work in the summer. We’ll see over time, but if it’s just a seasonal market we’re okay with that.

What do you see as the overall state of today”™s airline industry?

I think that we’re still not through with the kind of normalization of traffic post-Covid. I think on the domestic side we absolutely are, but on the international side we’re not.

As the larger legacy airlines start to put more and more of their seats back in the markets, where they fly all around the world, oftentimes those seats come from places that has a direct effect on us. So, there has been a shift back to what’s more normal for them, and I think that’ll continue to play itself out throughout the year as most of the world has now been opened up again.

There’s certainly been a fair share of challenges that evolved back to the pandemic, whether it be pilots or labor shortages, which we’re still working through, there’s still some of that out there, although it seems to be getting better. Obviously, energy prices up until recently have been pretty high, especially in the last year. But I”™d say the industry in general is pretty good. It’s not what it was pre-pandemic, and we’ll see over time how the industry in general performs.

About a half-hour west of Tweed is Sikorsky Memorial Airport. For years, there has been much talk about trying to bring that back as a commercial airport ”“ it used to have commercial flights until the 1990s. Do you see Sikorsky ever becoming a major competitor to Tweed?

I don’t think it’s viable. Maybe it will become viable, but I’m not sure how that happens. It’s kind of landlocked, and my understanding is that the path to extending the runway ”“ which is substantially shorter than Tweed is ”“ would be incredibly difficult.

If it does become viable, we’ll be there. We’ll serve Sikorsky as well as Tweed.

If we were to pick up this conversation a year from now, where do you see your company at that point?

I think that we’re going to be doing more of the same. I think that for now, until the new terminal is built in New Haven ”“ which will be on the other side of the airfield ”“ there’s some growth opportunities that remain for us.

I expect that we’ll continue to expand our footprint ”“ we have five bases, with New Haven being our biggest of the five. But we recently started up Wilmington, Delaware and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Not even a year ago, this past summer, we started up Orlando, and we’ve had a presence for almost two years out in Burbank in Los Angeles. I do expect us to add growth in those different bases, as well as potentially adding another base later this year.