The crash that killed two pilots at LaGuardia Airport last month came as the country’s airspace is under pressure.
There’s a shortage of air traffic controllers, and federal efforts to build up that workforce will take years to see results. Meanwhile, passenger numbers continue to grow, and traffic is expected to increase especially fast at large hubs, according to the FAA. Those 31 airports, like Atlanta, Chicago O’Hare, and LAX, each handle at least 1% of the country’s commercial passengers each year.
But the U.S. also has hundreds of smaller airports, which could play a bigger role in alleviating congestion at the largest hubs, if regulators and airlines choose to use them.
One small hub positioning itself to handle more traffic is Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport in Burlington, Vermont. In late March, the airport unveiled a terminal upgrade, funded largely by a $34 million Congressional earmark.
The terminal’s layout and its four new jet bridges can accommodate larger aircraft, and the waiting areas are significantly more spacious than the narrow hallway where four of the airport’s gates used to be clustered.
Passenger Donna Druchunus of Barton, Vermont, knows that hallway well.
“I used to wait in that long hallway, and it was so hot,” she said. “It never felt clean, because it was just so old and worn out.”
Still, Druchunus said she usually chooses to fly out of Burlington, even though she has other options. Boston Logan, a major international hub that handles more than a thousand flights a day, is about a three hour drive from her home. Burlington’s airport, with about 30 departures a day, is just under two hours away, and despite that hallway, “it is a nicer airport and it’s quieter and there’s no wait times,” Druchunus said.
With Burlington’s terminal upgrade to replace the cramped waiting area, her choice is even easier.
“It’s like, amazing,” Druchunus said as she waited for the first flight to leave from one of the new terminal’s gates. “There’s a fireplace and a kid’s playroom and everything. I had no idea that it was going to be like that.”
Making this small hub airport a more appealing choice to travelers, and airlines, could help relieve some of the congestion at other big hubs like Boston, at least a bit. That’s because Burlington is competing for market share.
Nic Longo, the airport’s director of aviation, said Burlington attracts half of the 3 million or so passengers that fly in and out of its market, which he said stretches from northern New York to New Hampshire.
“That means there’s another 1.5 million flyers that choose other airports,” Longo said.
His goal is to get more of them to choose Burlington, “so people don’t have to drive two, three, four hours to find a flight. If we have it here, we’ll be able to serve that same customer.”
In turn, that customer won’t be adding traffic to Boston’s skies.
But enticing airlines to spread routes to more small hubs, such as Burlington, is not an easy sell, according to Robert Mann, an independent airline industry analyst.
“The issue is, people want to fly where they want to fly,” Mann said. “They want to fly from and to those big places.”
And airlines build their networks to serve the most profitable routes.
“To borrow a phrase, why do people rob banks? Well, that’s where the money is,” Mann said. “Why do airlines schedule to these major airports? Well, that’s where the money is.”
So, big hubs end up with more service — and congestion — than small airports. And that trend is likely to continue. The FAA projects activity at large hubs will grow about 2% per year over the next two decades, about twice as fast as activity at small hubs.
At the same time, the country faces a persistent shortage of air traffic controllers to handle all those flights.
“It makes one wonder: Is our air traffic system reaching its saturation point in terms of the maximum level of stress it can handle?” said Dan Bubb, a former airline pilot and professor in residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
One short-term solution, Bubb said: The FAA can tell airlines its capping the number of flights at certain hubs during peak hours.
“It’s going to be a difficult conversation, though, because airlines don’t want to cut their flights,” he said.
But the conversation is already underway at one major airport: Chicago O’Hare.
In March, the FAA told airlines that they’d overpacked their Chicago schedules for this coming summer. So, regulators may limit the number of flights in and out of O’Hare in the months ahead. A similar limit is already in place at Newark Airport, in New Jersey, which has faced an acute shortage of air traffic controllers.
Capping flights isn’t an ideal solution, Bubb said. So in the long-run, he thinks the industry should take a second look at smaller hubs.
“They get overlooked, I think they’re undervalued, and I think it would be prudent to strongly consider increasing their visibility and making greater use of them.”
In Burlington, aviation director Nic Longo hopes that happens. His next goal is upgrading the other six gates at the airport.
“We need to adjust how our jet bridges work, how people get access to these aircraft and [we need] some space to do it,” Longo said.
The Burlington airport was designed in the 1950s, he said. To gain more market share, it needs to stay up to date.