Five Years Since COVID Hit, Connecticut's Bradley International Airport Aims for Even More Growth

Mar. 5—WINDSOR LOCKS — The roar of planes is not the only noise at Connecticut's flagship airport. These days, the clang of construction rings out too.

Significant projects to enhance baggage screening and improve the flow of passengers through the terminal are underway because Bradley International Airport needs to keep up with rebounding activity. Five years after COVID-19 spread to Connecticut, the airport in Windsor Locks is about as busy as it was right before the pandemic. And as new routes to destinations continue to launch, airport officials expect passenger traffic to keep rising.

"The industry obviously took a large hit after COVID. But getting back to where we were in 2019, in these last few months, has been great," said Michael Shea, who started last month as the new executive director of the Connecticut Airport Authority which owns and operates Bradley during a recent tour of the airport. "And going forward, we think there's even more growth that will happen."

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Post-pandemic rebound

The pandemic hit the aviation industry hard, and Bradley did not escape the disruption. In 2020, its annual passenger traffic plummeted 65% to 2.4 million.

But the airport's passenger numbers have climbed back steadily in the past few years. About 6.7 million passengers passed through the airport in 2024 — up 6.5% year-over-year and down only 1% from 2019.

Bradley's recovery has been powered by the launch of a number of new routes in the past few years. In 2022, the then-new, low-fare carrier Breeze Airways announced that the airport would become one of its hubs and that it planned to create more than 200 jobs in the state.

Today, Breeze operates about 20 routes out of Bradley, ranking No. 1 among carriers serving the airport. Those destinations include Columbus, Ohio; Las Vegas; Phoenix; Pittsburgh; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; as well as several cities in Florida, including Jacksonville.

"Having Breeze here allowed us to recover a lot of that traffic faster than we would have otherwise," Kevin Dillon, former executive director of CAA said in 2023.

Last year, another low-fare carrier, Avelo Airlines, expanded to Bradley. Connecticut was familiar territory for Avelo because it has a hub at Tweed New Haven Airport, where it has been running flights since 2021.

Avelo's launch last November at Bradley included flights to Charlotte/ Concord, North Carolina; Daytona Beach, Florida; Houston; Orlando/ Lakeland, Florida; and Wilmington, North Carolina. The carrier has since decided to end all of those routes, except the service to Daytona Beach. But some aviation experts said that it is inevitable that some destinations will not work out, particularly those to smaller cities.

"Some people got a nice flight. If it didn't work, that's fine. But nobody's 'out,'" said Michael Boyd, co-founder and president of the Colorado-based aviation consulting and forecasting firm Boyd Group International and a former station manager at Bradley for Braniff International.

Bradley's international service is also expanding. Avelo started flights last month to Montego Bay, Jamaica and Cancún, Mexico, and it began flights last month to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. Next month, BermudAir will launch flights between Bradley and Bermuda.

Among potential routes, CAA officials are interested in establishing direct service to London. Bradley has one nonstop destination in Europe: Aer Lingus' route to Dublin, which resumed in March 2023, after a three-year break due to the pandemic.

" London is a very important market," Shea said. "It's our largest unserved transatlantic market right now."

As activity continues to increase at Bradley, a number of state legislators endorsed the appointment of Shea as the new executive director of the CAA, a quasi-public agency established in 2011. Shea has succeeded Dillon, who retired after serving as the CAA's executive director since its launch. In addition to Bradley, CAA owns and operates five general aviation airports: Danielson, Groton- New London, Hartford-Brainard, Waterbury- Oxford and Windham.

Shea previously served as the CAA's deputy executive director and started with the organization in 2013 as its director of finance and chief financial officer.

"His transition from CFO into capital projects, business development and other management roles over those years made him the best choice after Kevin Dillon's retirement," said state Rep. Tami Zawistowski, a Republican whose district includes part of Windsor Locks. "Mike is extremely capable. He knows Bradley very well and is ready to lead Bradley and the general aviation airports under CAA's purview well into the future."

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'Great relationship' with FAA

While Bradley has benefited from the post-pandemic resurgence of air travel across the U.S., aviation safety has come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of the Jan. 29 collision between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., that killed all 67 people on board both aircraft.

CAA officials said they have confidence in Bradley's air traffic control, which is managed by the Federal Aviation Administration. Bradley is authorized for 20 air traffic controllers, but it has 15, according to FAA data shared last month by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D- Conn. Airports across the U.S. are typically operating with about 75% of their authorized head counts for air traffic control.

"We have a great relationship with the local FAA staff," Shea said. "If they want to hire more controllers, we would be supportive of that. But we aren't aware of any issues here at Bradley."

Shea added that, "we are trying to grow and have been successful in doing so. But we are a much less congested airport than you would see out of Washington, D.C., New York, Atlanta, etc."

Major infrastructure upgrades

To accommodate the growing passenger volume, several significant infrastructure improvements are underway at Bradley.

An 80,000-square-foot building under construction next to the airport's Sheraton hotel will house explosive-detection machines on its lower level and three gates on its upper floor. The new terminal space is scheduled to open by the end of this summer, while the baggage-screening facility is expected to be completed in early 2026.

The new baggage hub will be connected by a mile-long conveyor belt to the ticket counters in Bradley's terminal lobby. As a result, passengers will no longer to need to carry their checked bags over to the explosive-detection machines in the terminal lobby. The eventual removal of the current screening machines will create space for more ticket counters and alleviate lines.

Also under construction are corridors at both ends of Bradley's terminal that will process arriving passengers and connect them to baggage claim on the terminal's lower level. They are scheduled to open in phases between the late spring and late summer.

The corridors will replace the single exit lane in Bradley's main terminal, next to the airport's primary TSA security checkpoint. The eventual closing of the current exit will create more space for the checkpoint.

"They're very important projects," Shea said. "They're all about customer convenience and customer service."

The projects' estimated cost totals approximately $243 million. CAA has secured about $99 million in federal funding. The remaining $144 million will come from passenger-facility charges, which are included in the prices of airline tickets, and airport revenues, which comprise landing and terminal-use fees, as well as revenues from terminal concessions, parking and terminal advertising.

"I think that this is critical in terms of making sure we're appropriately modernizing," said state Sen. Christine Cohen, D- Guilford, co-chairwoman of the state legislature's Transportation Committee. "It enhances us in being a competitive transportation hub in the region."

Among infrastructure projects completed at the airport in the past few years, a ground transportation center opened in 2022. The hub includes 830 parking spots and a rental-car center.

In the years ahead, new initiatives could include the construction of a rail link between Bradley and a stop on the Hartford- Springfield, Massachusetts rail line. CAA officials indicated they want to first see the amount of demand for bus service between the airport and the new Windsor Locks train station, which is scheduled to open by the end of this year. Today, there are buses that run between Bradley and the current Windsor Locks station; the Windsor train station; and downtown Hartford, including a stop at Union Station.

"We did work with the local towns to preserve a corridor ... so that you have a lane, if you will, to build a rail connection," Shea said. "But for right now, it's monitoring the rehabilitation of the Windsor Locks train station, and then we would start engaging on high-frequency bus service."

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